Material Structure Design of Stress-Dependent Adaptive Stiffness

Use of functional material is a primitive and most promising approach to the functional structural system, e.g. adaptive/smart structures. It, however, is not always necessary for a certain aspect of such structural function. This study proposes a material structure design approach to the stress-dependent anisotropic adaptive stiffness by using the conventional linear elastic material of isotropy. The structural design problem has been formulated for the material structure consisting of mesoscopic unit cells and solved by using the simple isotropic material with penalization (SIMP) method for the topology design and the traction method for the geometry design for microstructure of the unit cell. The effectiveness of the proposed idea has been examined through numerical studies in two-dimensional cases.