Published April 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article

Systematic Design of Compliant Morphing Structures: A Phase-Field Approach

  • 1. ROR icon McMaster University
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

We investigate the systematic design of compliant morphing structures composed of materials reacting to an external stimulus. We add a perimeter penalty term to ensure existence of solutions. We propose a phase-field approximation of this sharp interface problem, prove its convergence as the regularization length approaches 0 and present an efficient numerical implementation. We illustrate the strengths of our approach through a series of numerical examples.

Copyright and License

© 2025 Springer Nature.

Funding

Support for this work was provided in part by the grant “Collaborative Research: Optimal Design of Responsive Materials and Structures” from the U.S. National Science Foundation (DMS:2009303 at Louisiana State University and McMaster University and DMS:2009289 at Caltech). BB also acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), RGPIN-2022-04536 and the Canada Research Chair program.

Contributions

All authors contributed to the study and manuscript preparation. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data Availability

Data files and computation results for Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 are hosted by the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada at https://doi.org/10.20383/103.01009.

Code Availability

The code used in this article is available under an open source license at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12746321.

Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2411.06289 (arXiv)
Is supplemented by
Software: 10.5281/zenodo.12746321 (DOI)
Dataset: 10.20383/103.01009 (DOI)

Funding

National Science Foundation
DMS-2009303
National Science Foundation
DMS-2009289
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
RGPIN-2022-04536
Canada Research Chairs

Dates

Accepted
2025-02-04
Available
2025-02-24
Published

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS)
Publication Status
Published