Computational design for 4D printing of topology optimized multi-material active composites

Recent efforts on design for four-dimensional(4D)printing have considered the spatial arrangement of smart materials and energy stimuli.The development of multifunctional structures and their desired mechanical/actuation performances require tackling 4D printing from a multi-material design perspective.With the materials distributions there is an opportunity to increase the spectrum of design concepts with computational approaches.The main goal being to achieve the“best”distribution of material properties in a voxelized structure,a computational framework that consists of a finite element analysis-based evolutionary algorithm is presented.It fuses the advantages of optimizing both the materials distribution and material layout within a design space via topology optimization to solve the inverse design problem of finding an optimal design to achieve a target shape change by integrating void voxels.The results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in providing a highly capable tool for the design of 4D-printed active composites.