Mesoscale design of heterogeneous material systems in multi-material additive manufacturing

Mesoscale heterogeneous material systems are efficient and adaptive to real world environments, owing to the non-uniform stress fields that result from the convolution of component geometries, loading conditions, and environmental changes. With the advent of multi-material additive manufacturing, the production of heterogeneous material systems with a pre-defined mesoscale material distribution becomes feasible. This unlocks the design freedom at a characteristic length scale between the macroscale geometry and microstructures, but also calls for a new design framework to optimize the mesoscale material distribution in multi-material additive manufacturing. Here, we propose and demonstrate such a design framework by incorporating digital image correlation-based deformation mapping with 3D finite element modeling-based computational optimization. The constitutive behavior of each constituent material or their mixtures is calibrated by matching the local deformation data. The optimal mesoscale material distribution can then be determined using global optimization algorithms and validated experimentally.