filename     : Schu18a.pdf
entry        : article
conference   : SIGGRAPH 2018, Vancouver, Canada, 12-16 August, 2018
pages        : 15
year         : 2018
month        : August
title        : Mechanical Characterization of Structured Sheet Materials
subtitle     :
author       : Schumacher, Christian and Marschner, Steve and Cross, Markus and Thomaszewski, Bernhard
booktitle    : ACM Transactions on Graphics
ISSN/ISBN    : 0730-0301
editor       : 
publisher    : ACM
publ.place   : New York, NY, USA
volume       : 37
issue        : 4
language     : english
keywords     : mechanical characterization, space-filing tiling
abstract     : We propose a comprehensive approach to characterizing the mechanical properties of structured sheet materials, i.e., planar rod networks whose mechanics and aesthetics are inextricably linked. We establish a connection between the complex mesoscopic deformation behavior of such structures and their macroscopic elastic properties through numerical homogenization. Our approach leverages 3D Kirchhoff rod simulation in order to capture nonlinear effects for both in-plane and bending deformations. We apply our method to different families of structures based on isohedral tilings---a simple yet extensive and aesthetically interesting group of space-filling patterns. We show that these tilings admit a wide range of material properties, and our homogenization approach allows us to create concise and intuitive descriptions of a material's direction-dependent macromechanical behavior that are easy to communicate even to non-experts. We perform this characterization for an extensive set of structures and organize these data in a material browser to enable efficient forward exploration of the aesthetic-mechanical space of structured sheet materials. We also propose an inverse design method to automatically find structure parameters that best approximate a user-specified target behavior.