An inverse synthesis method for the determination of effective mechanical properties for additively manufactured aperiodic structures with finite thickness

Abstract

The production of thin-walled structures via Additive Manufacturing is common for thermo-mechanical applications such as heat exchanger cores. However, accurate and efficient models predicting the effective material response of complex geometries with periodic inclusions where the finite size effect or aperiodicity is considered are limited. To address this challenge, here an inverse synthesis approach to calculate the effective material properties of periodic structures with finite thickness or aperiodicity is studied based on the Hill-Mandel equivalence principle under specific loading conditions using ANSYS optimization solver. The method is demonstrated on periodic microstructures with finite thickness/aperiodicity and square unit cells with circular inclusions. Results show that boundary conditions need to be revised to capture the finite size effect, but the framework has the potential of incorporating metrics and loadings for a variety of geometries with aperiodicity.