Generation of smoothly-varying infill configurations from a continuous menu of cell patterns and the asymptotic analysis of its mechanical behaviour

摘要

We here introduce a novel scheme for generating smoothly-varying infill graded microstructural (IGM) configurations from a given menu of generating cells. The scheme was originally proposed for essentially improving the variety of describable configurations in a modified asymptotic homogenisation-based topology optimisation framework (Zhu et al., 2019) for fast IGM design. But the proposed scheme, after modification, also demonstrates its values in two aspects of applications. First, it provides a fairly simple way of generating an IGM configuration continuously patching any given cell configurations. Second, it tenders a straightforward means for generating microstructures on a given manifold. We will further show that the form of topology description function given here effectively offers a platform for unifying most existing approaches for IGM generation. Fuelled by asymptotic analysis of the mechanical behaviour of the resulting IGM configurations, a topology optimisation scheme for their compliance minimisation is thus presented, whose effectiveness is further shown with numerical examples. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.