Implicitly Represented Architected Materials for Multi-Scale Design and High-Resolution Additive Manufacturing

Bio-inspired structured materials have achieved unprecedented progress in realizing exceptional, effective properties. However, a rational design paradigm that enables both tailoring complex 3D architectures and manufacturing the engineered hierarchical structured materials is still missing. To bridge this gap, this study presents a holistic design-through-printing framework with implicitly represents cellular materials for high-resolution structured materials design and manufacturing. Attributed to the parameterized implicit function-based representation (FRep), the material's microstructures can be effectively controlled to tune the material properties (e.g., isotropic, orthotropic, and anisotropic) while enabling functional gradation in the multi-scale hierarchical design. Given prescribed material properties in different applications, the proposed framework finds the optimal layout of microstructures with an adaptive cluster-based topology optimization algorithm. The geometry frustration problem brought by the mixture of distinct microstructures is simultaneously addressed with a spatial gradation scheme in the optimization loop. Lastly, the FRep-based architected material enables efficient geometry processing (e.g., slicing) for modern AM processes, thus facilitating the manufacturing of high-resolution delicate designed materials. The proposed framework is scalable and adaptable to accomplish a broad spectrum of design demands in various applications.