Cut-Cell Microstructures for Two-scale Structural Optimization

Abstract: Two-scale topology optimization, combined with the design of microstructure families with a broad range of effective material parameters, is increasingly widely used in many fabrication applications to achieve a target deformation behavior for a variety of objects. The main idea of this approach is to optimize the distribution of material properties in the object partitioned into relatively coarse cells, and then replace each cell with microstructure geometry that mimics these material properties. In this paper, we focus on adapting this approach to complex shapes in situations when preserving the shape's surface is important. Our approach extends any regular (i.e. defined on a regular lattice grid) microstructure family to complex shapes, by enriching it with individually optimized cut-cell tiles adapted to the geometry of the cut-cell. We propose an automated and robust pipeline based on this approach, and we show that the performance of the regular microstructure family is only minimally affected by our extension while allowing its use on 2D and 3D shapes of high complexity.