Evaluation of Cellular Solids Derived From Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces

Cellular solids are a class of materials that have many interesting engineering applications, including ultralight structural materials [1]. The traditional method for analyzing these solids uses convex uniform polyhedral honeycombs to represent the geometry of the material [2], and this approach has carried over into the design of digital cellular solids [3]. However, the use of such honeycomb-derived lattices makes the problem of decomposing a three-dimensional lattice into a library of two-dimensional parts non-trivial. We introduce a method for generating periodic frameworks from Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS), which result in geometries that are easier to decompose into digital parts. Additionally, we perform multi-scale analysis of two cellular solids generated from two TPMS, the P- and D-Schwarz, and two cellular solids, the Kelvin and Octet honeycombs. We show that the simulated behavior of these TMPS-derived structures shows the expected modulus of the cellular solid scaling linearly with relative density, and matches the behavior of the octet truss.