Optimally-Tailored Spinodal Architected Materials for Multiscale Design and Manufacturing

Spinodal architected materials with tunable anisotropy unify optimal design and manufacturing of multiscale structures. By locally varying the spinodal class, orientation, and porosity during topology optimization, a large portion of the anisotropic material space is exploited such that material is efficiently placed along principal stress trajectories at the microscale. Additionally, the bicontinuous, nonperiodic, unstructured, and stochastic nature of spinodal architected materials promotes mechanical and biological functions not explicitly considered during optimization (e.g., insensitivity to imperfections, fluid transport conduits). Furthermore, in contrast to laminated composites or periodic, structured architected materials (e.g., lattices), the functional representation of spinodal architected materials leads to multiscale, optimized designs with clear physical interpretation that can be manufactured directly, without special treatment at spinodal transitions. Physical models of the optimized, spinodal-embedded parts are manufactured using a scalable, voxel-based strategy to communicate with a masked stereolithography (m-SLA) 3D printer.