Abstract
Designing materials with tailored structural or functional properties is a fundamental goal of materials science and engineering. A vast research activity is currently devoted to achieving metamaterials with superior properties and optimized functionalities by carefully fine tuning both the microstructure and geometry of the material. Here, we discuss the impact of digital technologies in this research field by providing fast and cost effective tools to explore a large array of possibilities for materials and metamaterials. We report on recent progress obtained by combining numerical simulations, optimization techniques, artificial intelligence, and additive manufacturing methods and highlight promising research lines. The exploration of the space of possible material microstructures and geometries is reminiscent of the process of biological evolution in which traits are explored and selected according to their fitness. Biomimetic materials have long profited from adapting features of biological systems to the design of new materials and structures. Combining biomimetic approaches with digital simulation and optimization and with high throughput fabrication and characterization techniques may provide a step change in the evolutionary development of new materials.
Highlights
Discovering new materials with improved structural and functional properties has been a fundamental quest throughout centuries and millennia
The material discovery process can rely on computational approaches, allowing for rapid calculation of electronic, mechanical, or thermodynamic properties of possible materials that can be stored into databases for further search and analysis.[2,3]
Artificial metamaterials are composed of building blocks, which are typically arranged as unit cells so as to form repeating patterns that extend throughout the material.[14,33]
Summary
Discovering new materials with improved structural and functional properties has been a fundamental quest throughout centuries and millennia. While the optimization of the chemical composition plays an important role in new materials design, both structural and functional properties of most materials strongly depend on their microstructure well above the atomic scale. On this level, materials properties can be optimized and new functionalities can be acquired by targeted design of “architectured” microstructures. The design of materials microstructure and metamaterials is ideally suited for digital techniques that can rapidly and efficiently explore a multitude of possible geometrical and structural arrangements and test them numerically In this Perspective, we discuss recent advances and promising avenues in this direction. In the Conclusions, we present some of the most important outstanding challenges in the design and practical realization of architectured materials with extreme mechanical properties and discuss the fundamental role of the digital strategies in their transposition into tailored functionalities
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