Using Material Designer To Perform Homogenization Studies
Editor’s Note:
3D Printing and other advanced manufacturing methods are driving the increased use of lattice-type structures in structural designs. This is great for reducing mass and increasing the stiffness of components but can be a real pain for those of us doing simulation. Modeling all of those tiny features across a part is difficult to mesh and takes forever to solve.
PADT has been doing a bit of R&D in this area recently, including a recent PHASE II NASA STTR with ASU and KSU. We see a lot of potential in combining generative design and 3D Printing to drive better structures. The key to this effort is efficient and accurate simulation.
The good news is that we do not have to model every unit cell. Instead, we can do some simulation on a single representative chunk and use the ANSYS Material Designer feature to create an approximate material property that we can use to represent the lattice volume as a homogeneous material.
In the post below, PADT’s Alex Grishin explains it all with theory, examples, and a clear step-by-step process that you can use for your lattice-filled geometry.
