New paradigms in cellular material design and fabrication

Abstract

This paper presents an effective method for designing three dimensional (3D) cellular materials containing complex internal cellular microstructures. The volumetric distance field (VDF) strategy is developed to eliminate voxelization and interpolation processes required in the conventional voxel based DF method. By introducing a hybrid method based on the VDF and triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) cellular topology, we can design a variety of 3D cellular materials with intricate internal microstructures and arbitrarily-shaped external surfaces with unprecedented efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed design method has the capability to combine the perfectly interconnected channel networks based on the TPMS microstructures and the given object geometries in a consistent framework irrespective of the complexity of objects. In addition, in order to show the generality and versatility of the proposed method, a set of valuable applications are also illustrated through the innovative heat sink, heat exchanger, and enhanced lightweight cellular structure designs. Our findings suggest that the proposed design principles offered by TPMS-based cellular topology and VDF can be applied to create a wide range of advanced 3D cellular materials.