Design of materials with extreme thermal expansion using a three-phase topology optimization method

摘要

Composites with extremal or unusual thermal expansion coefficients are designed using a three-phase topology optimization method. The composites are made of two different material phases and a void phase. The topology optimization method consists in finding the distribution of material phases that optimizes an objective function (e.g. thermoelastic properties) subject to certain constraints such as elastic symmetry or volume fractions of the constituent phases, within a periodic base cell.