Simulation of Flexible Patterns by Structural Simplification

Abstract

In the field of computational design of meta materials, complex patterns of meso-structures have seen increased interest because of the ability to locally control their flexibility through adjustment of the meso-structure parameters. Such structures come with a number of advantages like, despite the simplicity of their fabrication, their ability to nestle to sophisticated free-form surfaces. However, the simulation of such complex structures still comes with a high computational cost. We propose an approach to reduce this computational cost by abstracting the meso-structures and encoding the properties of their elastic deformation behavior into a different set of material parameters. We can thus obtain an approximation of the deformed pattern by simulating a simplified version of the pattern using the computed material parameters.