Multi-physics inverse homogenization for the design of innovative cellular materials: application to thermo-mechanical problems

Abstract: We present a new algorithm to design lightweight cellular materials with required properties in a multi-physics context. In particular, we focus on a thermo-mechanical setting, by promoting the design of unit cells characterized both by an isotropic and an anisotropic behaviour with respect to mechanical and thermal requirements. The proposed procedure generalizes microSIMPATY algorithm to a multi-physics framework, by preserving all the good properties of the reference design methodology. The resulting layouts exhibit non-standard topologies and are characterized by very sharp contours, thus limiting the post-processing before manufacturing. The new cellular materials are compared with the state-of-art in engineering practice in terms of thermo-mechanical properties, thus highlighting the good performance of the new layouts which, in some cases, outperform the consolidated choices.