Design and Fabrication of Aerospace-Grade Digital Composite Materials

This Early Career Faculty research effort focused on the advancement of design rules and fabrication approaches necessary to create optimized and low-cost aerospace-grade structures from digital composite materials. The effort used a multi-cavity cross-section approach to improve buckling resistance of lattice structures and showed unparalleled improvements in lattice strengths relative to the structural mass, and developed models that can predict the buckling and/or fracture performance depending on the relative density of the structures. The effort also investigated lightweight lattice structures within energy absorbing applications. The lattice structures with modified struts showed an increase in the energy absorption through an increased resistance to compaction coupled with a smoothing of the stress-plateau during compaction.
The project efforts directly impact NASA’s technology roadmap, particularly TA12 (materials, structures, mechanical systems & manufacturing). The analysis and modeling tools and low-cost, flexible fabrication approaches for 1-D and 2-D discrete composite elements will enable modular structural designs that are optimized for stiffness, mass, and robustness under loading and impact. The specific benefits are broadly grouped as positively impacting flexibility and cost efficiency. Mission flexibility will be enhanced by in-field adaptation of modular structural designs. The manufacturing of composite components within the proposed design-print-deploy approach will be flexible and enable rapid iteration.