12/7/2015 Kurt Maute, Anton Tkachuk, Jiangtao Wu, H. Jerry Qi, Zhen Ding and Martin L. Dunn
J. Mech. Des 137(11), 111402; doi: 10.1115/1.4030994
Multi-material polymer printers allow the placement of different materials within a composite. The individual material phases can be spatially arranged and shaped in an almost arbitrary fashion. Utilizing the shape memory behavior of at least one of the material phases, active composites can be 3D printed such that they deform from an initially flat plate into a curved structure. To navigate this vast design space, systematically and efficiently explorer design options, and find an optimum layout of the composite this paper presents a novel design optimization approach. The optimization approach combines a level set method for describing the material layout and a generalized formulation of the extended finite element method (XFEM) for predicting the response of the printed active composite (PAC). This combination of methods yields optimization results that can be directly printed without the need for additional post-processing steps. The proposed optimization method is studied with examples where the target shapes correspond to a plate-bending type deformation and to a localized deformation. The optimized designs are 3D printed and the XFEM predictions are compared against the experimental measurements. The design studies demonstrate the ability of the proposed optimization method to yield a crisp and highly resolved description of the optimized material layout that can be realized by 3D printing.

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