Optimal Design of Programmable Mechanical Metamaterials

Programmable metamaterials (PMs) belong to the class of metamaterials offering controllable and variable physical properties. As metamaterials, they are architectured, cellular materials and exhibit exotic behavior, but are more specifically tailored for engineering purposes: PMs can be applied wherever a custom-fit reaction to environmental and operating conditions of a material is required. Instead of a homogeneous layout of unit cells, often considered for common metamaterials, we construct PMs by an individual distribution of varying unit cells. In order to tackle this customization of material response, a computational framework similar to topology or material optimization is proposed. Beyond that, our work is based on a multiscale approach and a surrogate material model, allowing a broad range of applications with different classes of unit cells and target functions under finite strains. In this contribution, we present the complete simulation chain: from a parametrized unit cell to the final model of the programmable material, ready to be manufactured. Numerical results with different unit cells are shown and compared to fully resolved simulations as well as to experiments.