| dc.description.abstract | The development of custom cellular materials has been driven by recent advances in
additive manufacturing and structural topological optimization. These contemporary materials
with complex topologies have better structural efficiency than traditional materials. Particularly,
truss-like cellular structures exhibit considerable potential for application in lightweight structures
owing to their excellent strength-to-mass ratio. Along with being light, these materials can exhibit
unprecedented vibration properties, such as the phononic bandgap, which prohibits the propagation
of mechanical waves over certain frequency ranges. Consequently, they have been extensively
investigated over the last few years, being the cores for sandwich panels among the most important
potential applications of lattice-based cellular structures. This study aims to develop a methodology
for optimizing the topology of sandwich panels using cellular truss cores for bandgap maximization.
In particular, a methodology is developed for designing lightweight composite panels with vibration
absorption properties, which would bring significant benefits in applications such as satellites,
spacecraft, aircraft, ships, automobiles, etc. The phononic bandgap of a periodic sandwich structure
with a square core topology is maximized by varying the material and the geometrical properties of
the core under different configurations. The proposed optimization methodology considers smooth
approximations of the objective function to avoid non-differentiability problems and implements an
optimization approach based on the globally convergent method of moving asymptotes. The results
show that it is feasible to design a sandwich panel using a cellular core with large phononic bandgaps. | |
