Daniel Courtney Richards

Shape Optimization With Surface-Mapped CPPNs

Shape optimization techniques are becoming increasingly important in design and engineering. This growing significance reflects the need to exploit advances in digital fabrication technologies, and the desire to create new types of surface designs for various engineering applications. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) offer several key advantages for shape optimization, but they can also be restricted, especially as design problems scale up in size. A key challenge for evolutionary shape optimization is to overcome these challenges in order to apply EAs to large-scale, “real-world” engineering problems. This paper presents a new evolutionary approach to shape optimization using what we call “surface-mapped compositional pattern producing networks (CPPNs).” Our method outperforms a state-of-the-art gradient-based method on a simple benchmark problem, and scales well as degrees of freedom are added to the design problem. Our results demonstrate that surface-mapped CPPNs offer practical ways of approaching large-scale, real-world engineering problems with EAs, opening up exciting new opportunities for engineering design.

Directing self-assembly to grow adaptive physical structures

Additive manufacturing technologies offer exciting opportunities to rethink the process of designing and fabricating physical structures. This paper outlines initial work that seeks to extend existing AM capabilities, creating physically adaptive structures by exploiting processes of self-assembling materials. The paper details an investigation of self-assembling structures that can respond to different conditions by adapting their physical properties over time. The process uses electrolysis of seawater to demonstrate a proof-of-concept of tuneable material structures, via crystal growth. Results demonstrate an aggregation-based multi-material system that is sensitive to changing environmental conditions. Material properties of grown structures have been analysed and illustrate that different materials can be created from an abundant base material (seawater) by manipulating environmental conditions (i.e. electrical current). It is found that turbulence is a useful property within these kinds of systems and that the physical properties of cathode scaffold structures have a significant impact in controlling material properties and resolution.