4D printing self-morphing structures

Bodaghi, Mahdi; Noroozi, Reza; Zolfagharian, Ali; Fotouhi, Mohamad; Norouzi, Saeed

Abstract

© 2019 by the authors. Themain objective of thispaper is to introduce complex structureswith self-bending/morphing/ rolling features fabricated by 4D printing technology, and replicate their thermo-mechanical behaviors using a simple computational tool. Fused deposition modeling (FDM) is implemented to fabricate adaptive composite structures with performance-driven functionality built directly into materials. Structural primitives with self-bending 1D-to-2D features are first developed by functionally graded 4D printing. They are then employed as actuation elements to design complex structures that show 2D-to-3D shape-shifting by self-bending/morphing. The effects of printing speed on the self-bending/morphing characteristics are investigated in detail. Thermo-mechanical behaviors of the 4D-printed structures are simulated by introducing a straightforward method into the commercial finite element (FE) software package of Abaqus that is much simpler than writing a user-defined material subroutine or an in-house FE code. The high accuracy of the proposed method is verified by a comparison study with experiments and numerical results obtained from an in-house FE solution. Finally, the developed digital tool is implemented to engineer several practical self-morphing/rolling structures.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 22, 2019
• Publication Date: Apr 25, 2019
• Deposit Date: Apr 24, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 17, 2019
• Journal: Materials
• Print ISSN: 1996-1944
• Electronic ISSN: 1996-1944
• Publisher: MDPI
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 8
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ma12081353
• Keywords: 4D printing, shape memory polymer, self-morphing, experiments, FEM
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/848321
• Contract Date: Sep 17, 2019