Narrow Results

As an important class of natural and engineered materials, periodic microstructural composites have drawn substantial attention from the material research community for their excellent flexibility in tailoring various desirable physical behaviors. To develop periodic cellular composites for multifunctional applications, this paper presents a unified design framework for combining stiffness and a range of physical properties governed by quasi-harmonic partial differential equations. A multiphase microstructural configuration is sought within a periodic base-cell design domain using topology optimization. To deal with conflicting properties, e.g. conductivity/permeability versus bulk modulus, the optimum is sought in a Pareto sense. Illustrative examples demonstrate the capability of the presented procedure for the design of multiphysical composites and tissue scaffolds.

Dispersive properties of elastic waves in a periodic composite with an array of fluid-filled holes are studied in this paper. A finite element method taking into account of the fluid–solid interaction is developed to calculate the dispersion curves. The finite element formulation is presented for one unit cell by taking advantage of the periodicity of the structures and the Bloch theorem. After dividing the equations in the real and imaginary parts, the numerical computation is performed by using the standard finite element code ABAQUS. As numerical examples, some typical two- and three-dimensional systems with circular or spherical holes filled with air, water or mercury are considered in detail. The method can yield precise results with fast convergence for all cases from very low-density fluids to very high-density fluids.