![]() The former takes advantage of experience and knowledge as well as human intuition and understanding of basic problems to provide straightforward solutions for elementary needs that can then be compounded to respond to more complex requirements. This naturally leads to two types of design strategies, knowledge-based design (intuitive) and computational design (possibly counter-intuitive) 17. Inversely, this brings with it a complexity in determining the best approach or strategy to attain the optimal materials distribution for a specific need 16. Conceptually, this provides a massive breakthrough in terms of design in the form of a parameter that opens the door to an almost infinite number of possibilities which were not available when working with unique standard materials. In other words, the spatial layout of both materials, also known as the materials distribution, in an active composite is the biggest factor that influences the specific shape changes induced. In the context of active composites, the reaction to an environmental stimulus is largely dependent on the constraints applied to the inert matrix material. The various classes of smart materials prominently researched include shape memory polymers 8, shape memory alloys 9, liquid crystal elastomers 10, 11, 12, 13 and hydrogels 14, 15 to name a few. As present in the literature, these actuations, commonly referred to as energy stimuli, ranges in terms of accessibility and ease of use from heat/temperature 2 to humidity, pH, solvent 3, electricity 4, magnetism 5, 6, light 7, etc. Smart materials are an umbrella term that englobes a variety of materials that can be subjected to transformations in shape as well as other properties such as stiffness, state (of matter), color, etc., with a specific actuation. ![]() As its name suggests, active composites consist of at least two different materials, one, if not both 1, comprising of a smart material and another passive or inert material. The emergence of increasingly ground-breaking scientific advancement of the additive manufacturing sector over the past decades as well as cutting-edge discoveries in the domain of active materials have birthed a novel class of (meta)material(s): active composites. ![]() The results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in providing a highly capable tool for the design of 4D-printed active composites. It fuses the advantages of optimizing both the materials distribution and material layout within a design space via topology optimization to solve the inverse design problem of finding an optimal design to achieve a target shape change by integrating void voxels. The main goal being to achieve the “best” distribution of material properties in a voxelized structure, a computational framework that consists of a finite element analysis-based evolutionary algorithm is presented. With the materials distributions there is an opportunity to increase the spectrum of design concepts with computational approaches. The development of multifunctional structures and their desired mechanical/actuation performances require tackling 4D printing from a multi-material design perspective. Recent efforts on design for four-dimensional (4D) printing have considered the spatial arrangement of smart materials and energy stimuli.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |