Abstract
The recent advances in additive manufacturing technology enable the development of complicated structural systems. For instance, meso-scale lattice structures (MSLS) have significant potential to be applied in light-weight applications. Determining the appropriate designs for these truss-like cellular structures can be a challenging task due to their geometric complexities and prohibitive computational costs in design processes. In this research, a new design method, namely, relative density mapping (RDM) method is developed by utilizing the material density information obtained from topology optimization results in continuum structures. The proposed method utilizes by-product information from topology optimization results to design cellular structures after the topology optimization has been conducted to decide the layout of the structure. Since the proposed method does not require additional optimization or black-box simulation procedures, it can drastically reduce computational costs in the design process of the cellular structures. Moreover, the developed method can be applicable to any complicated shapes of cellular structures. The efficacy of the developed method is compared to existing methods. The presented results demonstrate significant potential for designing truss-like cellular structures based on the by-product information from the topology optimization procedure.