MIT News August 2, 2023
Cellular metamaterials are small scale, tileable structures that can be architected to exhibit many useful material properties. But their “architectures” vary widely making it difficult to explore them using existing representations. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, Austria) created a technique to include many different building blocks of cellular metamaterials into one, unified graph-based representation using which engineers can quickly and easily model metamaterials, edit the structures, and simulate their properties. Their procedural graph succinctly represents the construction process for any structure using a simple skeleton annotated with spatially varying thickness. To express the highly constrained triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) in this manner, their fully automated version of the conjugate surface construction method, allows novices to create complex TPMS from intuitive input. They demonstrated their representation’s expressiveness, accuracy, and compactness by constructing a wide range of established structures and hundreds of novel structures with diverse architectures and material properties. They conducted a user study to verify their representation’s ease-of-use and ability to expand engineers’ capacity for exploration… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Structures spanning five major classes of cellular architectures… Credit: ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 42, Issue 5, Article No.: 168pp 1–19, July 28, 2023