Martin L. Dunn is a Professor and Dean of the College of Engineering, Design and Computing  at the University of Colorado Denver.   He joined CU Denver in 2018 after serving as Professor and Founding Associate Provost for Research at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) where he oversaw the design and operation of the research and innovation enterprise.  Prior to joining SUTD, he served as a Program Director in the Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation Division at the US National Science Foundation.  He served the NSF while on leave from the University of Colorado, Boulder where he held the Victor Schelke Endowed Chair.  Dunn's research focuses on understanding the mechanics and physics of complex heterogeneous materials through a combination of theory and experiment, and using this understanding to create methods and tools to design and manufacture new materials and components.  He has received international recognition and awards for his research accomplishments as well as awards for products designed with the methods and tools developed from his research.  

Title

Design and Additive Manufacture of Composite Materials and Structures

Abstract

I describe our recent developments of a multiscale digital design and manufacturing workflow that simultaneously determines the macroscopic topology and the spatially-variable microstructure of 3D composite components based on a combination of data-driven statistical homogenization, finite element simulation, and multiscale topology optimization [1, 2].  Our approach results in a 3D map of anisotropic composite stiffness, parameterized by microstructure descriptors that depend on the specific additive manufacturing technology used to realize the component.  We apply our approach to 3D solid and multilayer plate composite components performing in static and dynamic settings - realizing them by additive manufacturing (both voxel-based photopolymer jetting and direct write technologies), and experimentally validating their performance.  I will describe the most recent extensions of our approach to continuous fiber composite structures where a computer graphics approach is used to translate the abstract design representation in terms of the spatially-variable anisotropic stiffness to physically realizable continuous fiber layouts in two and three dimensions.  Figures 1 shows an example of a components recently designed and fabricated with our digital workflow [1]. 

Figure 1: Optimal design and additive manufacture of the microstructure and macroscale topology of a composite structure – an ipad holder.

References

[1] N. Boddeti, Z. Ding,  S. Kaijima, K. Maute, and M. L. Dunn, M. L., 2018, "Simultaneous digital design and additive manufacture of structures and materials," 2018, Scientific Reports 8 (1), 15560.

[2] I. F. Ituarte, N. Boddeti, V. Hassani, M. L. Dunn, and D. W. Rosen, 2019, "Design and Additive Manufacture of Functionally Graded Structures Based on Digital Materials," Additive Manufacturing, Vol. 30, 100839.