What is the Metamaterial Design Lab?
The MetaMaterial Design lab focuses on novel 3D printed material structures, material combinations, and their applications. By integrating material science with computational design and digital fabrication, we generate knowledge for future generations of 3D printed products.
Additive Manufacturing (AM) or 3D Printing is a digital fabrication method that is increasingly being used as a production method for products. Being both an additive and digital process, AM offers unique capabilities compared to traditional manufacturing. Utilizing these capabilities, the industry is using AM to make customized products, parts with complex geometry, and to allow on-demand manufacturing. However, the designs of these 3D printed applications generally still follow the traditional approach: a geometry is designed and a suitable material for a part is selected. This approach ignores one major opportunity of 3D Printing: the ability to design the properties of the 3D printed material. Designed properties include, for example, mechanical, optical and acoustic properties.
We have just scratched the surface of the possibilities of 3D printed metamaterials. At the MetaMaterial Design Lab, we generate knowledge that supports designers to develop and apply metamaterials in the unexplored regions of the property space.
The ability to design the material properties arises from 3D printing’s ability to build structures at different scales. The scales can range from sub-millimeter scale to the centimeter scale. Structures can be single-material structures or be composed of multiple materials. Metamaterials have properties which emerge from the design of these 3D printed structures rather than the print material itself.
Publications
List of publications
- Computational Design for Digitally Fabricated 3D Inductive Power Transfer Coils J Xu, EL Doubrovski, J Geraedts, Y Song Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 1-28
- Memory-Efficient modeling and slicing of Large-Scale adaptive lattice structures S Liu, T Liu, Q Zou, W Wang, EL Doubrovski, CCL Wang Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering 21 (6)
- Design 3D Printed Coils for WPT J Xu, EZL Doubrovski, JMP Geraedts, Y Song International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and …
- Knitting 4D garments with elasticity controlled for body motion Z Liu, X Han, Y Zhang, X Chen, YK Lai, EL Doubrovski, E Whiting, ... ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 40 (4), 1-16
- A framework for adaptive width control of dense contour-parallel toolpaths in fused deposition modeling T Kuipers, EL Doubrovski, J Wu, CCL Wang Computer-Aided Design 128, 102907
- Multi‐material 3D printing of functionally graded hierarchical soft–hard composites MJ Mirzaali, M Cruz Saldívar, A Herranz de la Nava, D Gunashekar, ... Advanced Engineering Materials 22 (7), 1901142
- Soft robotic module for sensing and controlling contact force A Buso, RBN Scharff, EL Doubrovski, J Wu, CCL Wang, P Vink 2020 3rd IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), 70-75
- Mechanics of bioinspired functionally graded soft-hard composites made by multi-material 3D printing MJ Mirzaali, AH De La Nava, D Gunashekar, M Nouri-Goushki, ... Composite Structures 237, 111867
Lab facilities
Education
ID5454 Digital Materials
ID4175 Advanced Embodiment Design
IO-MI-221 Minor Advanced Prototyping