DARPA News January 15, 2021
DARPA’s TRAnsformative DESign (TRADES) program, which began in 2017, set out to develop foundational design tools needed to explore the new materials and additive manufacturing processes (3D printing). The program recently concluded. In the past four years, TRADES has explored new ideas from mathematics and computer science that have allowed us to now represent things – like parts and components – that are a million times more complex than current state-of-the-art systems can represent. Now it is possible to describe both shape and material in a coordinated way across multiple physics to allow intricate designs and to understand properties at every point on the produced part. The aim is to be able to mimic integrated hierarchical structures found in nature, where different sized structures respond to different types of physics. TRADES is positioned to handle future 3D printing capabilities to include biological components such as a femur, including the “spongy” interior structures. Other challenge problems related to TRADES serve as future benchmarks…read more
… Pictured on the left is a complex lattice structure with the code required to generate it…Credit: Siemens Technology