Inverse Design Machine And Making A Designer Impact-Mitigating Architectured Isotropic Structure

This invention is a tool for designing structured materials with a desired set of mechanical properties arising from an aperiodic arrangement of elastic elements for impact mitigation applications. You input a desired mechanical response for the final structure, and the algorithm that drives the tool automatically adjusts the arrangement of elements to achieve the final desired properties. The structural design is then fed to an additive or subtractive manufacturing tool, such as a 3D printer, that creates a physical structure with the desired properties. 

Commercially viable tool to design impact-mitigating materials for sporting and protective equipment. This algorithm enables the inverse design of structured materials with mechanical properties that are difficult to achieve with monolithic materials.  It is a new approach to creating materials using structural elements whose size scales can span from meters to nanometers.

This inverse design engine generates disordered structures that are unlike architectured materials. These structures have a periodic structure and thus possess anisotropic mechanical properties. The products from this design engine can generate structures with isotropic mechanical properties that are specific to the requirements of a particular impact mitigation application.