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HEIndividual fellowship2024–2026

microFFTTO · Reduced-order topology optimisation of high-resolution microstructures with internal contact

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2024-03-01 → 2026-02-28
EU contribution
€189,687
Participants
1
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Results in brief

Reduced-order topology optimisation of high-resolution microstructures with internal contact

Additive manufacturing (3D printing) technologies are progressively advancing toward the microscale, enabling the fabrication of so-called architectured (meta)materials — materials whose mechanical properties arise not from their chemical composition but from their carefully engineered internal geometric structure. Such materials can be lighter, stronger, and more multifunctional than conventional bulk materials, and hold considerable promise for applications in aerospace, biomedical, and sustainable engineering. Realising this potential requires moving beyond trial-and-error design toward automated computational methods. Topology optimisation — a technique that automatically determines the optimal material arrangement within a given design domain — is well suited to this task. However, applying it at the microscale is computationally very demanding: a single cubic millimetre of material discretised at micrometre resolution yields billions of computational elements, which exceeds the capacity of even state-of-the-art solvers. Algorithms based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) offer a practical way forward, as they are well suited to the regular grid structures that arise naturally in additive manufacturing — but further development was needed before they could be applied routinely at the resolutions modern manufacturing now enables. The µFFTTO project, conducted at the University of Freiburg within the livMatS Cluster of Excellence, set out to address this gap by developing faster and more memory-efficient FFT-based algorithms for the topology optimisation of high-resolution microstructures.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Exploiting the full potential of additive manufacturing methods requires a leap forward in advanced modelling and computing techniques. While additive manufacturing enables the high-precision fabrication of architectured mechanical (meta)materials, its design is currently driven by human experience. As such, it could greatly benefit from numerical Topology Optimisation (TO) techniques. The µFFTTO project addresses two challenges of in-silico design of high-resolution architectured microstructures. First, state-of-the-art finite element computational homogenisation approaches, even when accelerated with highly efficient Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) techniques, are too costly for microstructures discretised into billions of voxels. I will significantly reduce their cost by developing a novel mesh coarsening technique based on low-rank tensor approximations. Second, as the manufacturing resolutions reach micrometre accuracy and the surface-to-volume ratio increases, surface effects, including adhesive contact, need to be accounted for in the TO formulations. This project will incorporate adhesive interaction into the low-rank FFT-based computational homogenisation scheme. As a result, the µFFTTO project will deliver computationally and memory affordable algorithms for microstructure TO on regular grids, which account for internal contacts with adhesion and are directly transferable to contemporary fabrication techniques. The project will be conducted in cooperation with leading experts on multiscale modelling and additive manufacturing from the livMatS Cluster of Excellence, University of Freiburg, Germany, with an emphasis on future collaboration with and knowledge transfer to the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • ALBERT-LUDWIGS-UNIVERSITAET FREIBURG · FreiburgCoordinatorGermany

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union