DMREF/Collaborative Research: Iterative Design and Fabrication of Hyperuniform-Inspired Materials for Targeted Mechanical and Transport Properties

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Micro-lattice and nano-lattice structures are an exciting class of materials with better strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios than bulk solids. Many designs and additive-manufacturing approaches (i.e., 3D printing) have emerged recently for creating such materials, with the goal of fabricating commercially available products with optimized mechanical, thermal, acoustic, and electrical properties for biomedical, aerospace, and several other applications. This Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) grant will support development of novel approaches to design a new class of disordered lattice materials that are inspired by the special transport properties, e.g., heat transfer and diffusion, of the so-called “hyperuniform” structures. Hyperuniform materials may nominally be described as materials with minimal density variation as the length scale increases. They arise naturally in biological and chemical systems and can be designed through numerical methods. Numerous studies have demonstrated that such systems facilitate efficient transport behavior with minimal attenuation while also possessing nearly optimal effective elastic stiffness and material fracture suppression. The grant will also provide effective workforce development for a diverse group of undergraduates, PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers in the multidisciplinary areas of engineering, materials science, mathematics, and physics. It will contribute to the public understanding of materials research via publications, outreach, and internship programs for high-school students and teachers. Additionally, there will be an effort to develop entrepreneurship and trainees will be supported in pursuing commercialization of their ideas. The objective of this project is to engineer a new class of ultralight, manufacturable materials with jointly optimized mechanical (stiffness and strength) and transport (thermal, acoustic, and electrical) properties. To achieve this, the approach includes (1) characterization and understanding of the benefits of exploiting local uniformity and hyperuniformity; (2) measurement of mechanical and transport properties to create and understand the structure–process–property diagram for these materials, including the influence of heterogeneity and defects; and (3) development of new computational tools that allow optimization throughout the integrated theory, synthesis, and experiment loop of material development. The research activities will pursue three routes for property co-optimization: (1) adjustments to the initial configuration, including connectivity (theory); (2) material selection and control of microscale heterogeneity that is created by the additive-manufacturing process (synthesis); (3) designing time-varying signals that create specified spatial correlations when applied to structures (experiment). The approach will also include new modeling approaches, such as network analysis to create design heuristics and higher-order stochastic spatial-averaging techniques to account for microscale heterogeneity. These models will efficiently feed back into the design process by allowing the creation of random-network models that generate specific features that also remain manufacturable. The design cycle that forms the basis of the research aims draws heavily on building a shared Configuration Library and Code Library; these will be published for use by other research groups. This project is supported by the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) of the Directorate for Engineering (ENG) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) and the Division of Materials Research (DMR) of the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.