Multi-Physics Inverse Homogenization for the Design of Innovative Cellular Materials: Application to Thermo-Elastic Problems

We present a new algorithm to design lightweight cellular materials with required properties in a multi-physics context. In particular, we focus on a thermo-elastic setting by promoting the design of unit cells characterized both by an isotropic and an anisotropic behavior with respect to mechanical and thermal requirements. The proposed procedure generalizes the microSIMPATY algorithm to a thermo-elastic framework by preserving all the good properties of the reference design methodology. The resulting layouts exhibit non-standard topologies and are characterized by very sharp contours, thus limiting the post-processing before manufacturing. The new cellular materials are compared with the state-of-art in engineering practice in terms of thermo-elastic properties, thus highlighting the good performance of the new layouts which, in some cases, outperform the consolidated choices.