Our goal is to facilitate the design, analysis, optimization, and additive manufacturing of a specific class of 3D lattices that may comprise an extremely large number of elements. We target curved lattices that exhibit periodicity and uniform geometric gradations in three directions, along possibly curved axes. We represent a lattice by a simple computer program with a carefully selected set of exposed control parameters that may be used to adjust the overall shape of the lattice, its repetition count in each direction, its microstructure, and its gradation. In our Programmed-Lattice Editor (PLE), a typical lattice is represented by a short program of 10 to 50 statements. We propose a simple API and a few rudimentary GUI tools that automate the creation of the corresponding expressions in the program. The overall shape and gradation of the lattice is controlled by three similarity transformations. This deliberate design choice ensures that the gradation in each direction is regular (i.e., mathematically steady), that each cell can be evaluated directly, without iterations, and that integral properties (such as surface area, volume, center of mass and spherical inertia) can be obtained rapidly without having to calculate them for each individual element of the lattice.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018)
Kurzeja, Kelsey; Rossignac, Jarek
Advances in additive manufacturing techniques are enabling the fabrication of new microstructures and materials. These may often be defined in terms of a set of balls and of beams that each connects two balls. To support application needs, we must support lattices with billions of such elements. To address this problem, we focus on architected and periodic structures in which the connectivity pattern repeats in three directions, and in which the positions and radii of the balls evolve through the structure in a prescribed and steady way that is defined by three similarity transforms. We propose here an algorithm that accelerates the Ball-Interference Query (BIQ), which establishes which elements of the lattice interfere with a query ball Q. Our RangeFinder (RF) solution reduces the asymptotic complexity of BIQs, which, in our tests, reduced the query time by a factor of between 45 and 5500. RF does not use any spatial occupancy data structure and can be trivially parallelized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RangeFinder through the generation of multi-level lattices that we call Lattice-in-Lattice (LiL).