Robust Elastic Metamaterial Design for Additive Fabrication

Event details

Date	26.04.2018
Hour	16:15 › 16:45
Speaker	Dr. Julian Panetta - EPFL IC IINFCOM Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory (LGG)
Location	MED 0 1418
Category	Conferences - Seminars

Abstract Additive fabrication technologies like 3D printing can efficiently manufacture geometry of arbitrary complexity but offer only limited control over the elastic material properties of the printed part. In this talk, I will present my work on designing elastic metamaterials for 3D printing: periodic microstructures that are tuned to emulate a large space of elastic materials. Since microstructures typically contain thin features that concentrate stress, they are prone to plastic deformation and fracture even under mild deformations of the macro-scale object. A key goal of my work is to design microstructures that minimize these stress concentrations, improving the metamaterials' robustness in practice. The design algorithm I developed is based on a efficient, exact solution to the worst-case stress analysis problem for periodic microstructures which supports several failure criteria (e.g., maximum principal stress or von Mises stress); it produces microstructures that minimize worst-case stresses while achieving a particular target elasticity tensor and satisfying fabrication constraints. I also will present a design tool to optimally apply these metamaterials to achieve high-level deformation goals.

Bio Julian Panetta is a post-doctoral researcher in the LGG group at EPFL. He is interested in simulation and optimal design problems, specifically focusing on applications for 3D printing.