Lattice structures, which are also known as architected cellular structures, have been applied in various industrial sectors, owing to their fascinated performances, such as low elastic modulus, high stiffness-to-weight ratio, low thermal expansion coefficient, and large specific surface area. The lattice structures fabricated by conventional manufacturing technologies always involve complicated process control, additional assembly steps, or other uncontrollable factors. Furthermore, limited types of unit cells can be used to construct lattice structures when using conventional processes. Fortunately, additive manufacturing technology, based on a layer-by-layer process from computer-aided design models, demonstrates the unique capability and flexibility and provides an ideal platform in manufacturing complex components like lattice structures, resulting in an effective reduction in the processing time to actual application and minimum of material waste. Therefore, additive manufacturing relieves the constraint of structure design and provides accurate fabrication for lattice structures with good quality. This work systematically presents an overview of conventional manufacturing methods and novel additive manufacturing technologies for metallic lattice structures. Afterward, the design, optimization, a variety of properties, and applications of metallic lattice structures produced by additive manufacturing are elaborated. By summarizing state-of-the-art progress of the additively manufactured metallic lattice structures, limitations and future perspectives are also discussed.

Additive manufacturing of metallic lattice structures: Unconstrained design, accurate fabrication, fascinated performances, and challenges

Recent trends in piezoelectric actuators for precision motion and their applications: a review

Ever since the publication of the 99-line topology optimization MATLAB code (top99) by Sigmund in 2001, educational articles have emerged as a popular category of contributions within the structural and multidisciplinary optimization (SMO) community. The number of educational papers in the field of SMO has been growing rapidly in recent years. Some educational contributions have made a tremendous impact on both research and education. For example, top99 (Sigmund in Struct Multidisc Optim 21(2):120–127, 2001) has been downloaded over 13,000 times and cited over 2000 times in Google Scholar. In this paper, we attempt to provide a systematic and comprehensive review of educational articles and codes in SMO, including topology, sizing, and shape optimization and building blocks. We first assess the papers according to the adopted methods, which include density-based, level-set, ground structure, and more. We then provide comparisons and evaluations on the codes from several key aspects, including techniques, efficiency, usability, readability, environment, and compatibility. In addition, we conduct numerical experiments on the reviewed codes using the benchmark cantilever beam example to provide feedback on the overall user experience. With a systematic review and comparison, this paper aims to offer insights on the educational values and practicality for employing these codes. We try to provide not only guidance for beginners to approach various optimization methods, but also a dictionary to direct readers to effectively target the relevant codes and building blocks based on their demands. Finally, based on the findings in this review paper, we provide some perspectives and recommendations for future educational contributions.

A comprehensive review of educational articles on structural and multidisciplinary optimization

Improving the functionality of soft continuum manipulators to expand their application space has always been an important development direction for soft robotics. It remains very challenging to calculate the deformations of soft materials and predict the basic structure of soft fingers under complex objective functions and constraints. This work develops a cable-driven soft robotic gripper with multi-input and multi-output using topology optimization considering geometric nonlinearity, which not only performs adaptive grasping but also enables finer manipulations such as rotating or panning the target. A scheme that can describe adaptive grasping behavior is proposed, which converts the contact between the clamping surface and the object into a boundary condition to circumvent complex contact nonlinearities. An additive hyperelasticity technique is used to overcome numerical instabilities, and the finite element analysis is performed in ANSYS. Numerical simulations and experimental results are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the optimization algorithm and to illustrate the application potential of the proposed gripper.

Topology optimization of a cable-driven soft robotic gripper

The piezoelectric-actuated compliant microgripper (PEACM) plays an essential role in the application fields such as biomedical engineering, microelectronics, and optical engineering. As compared with other categories of grippers, PEACM exhibits the advantages of high accuracy of displacement, large power to weight ratio, low energy consumption, and fast response speed. This paper reviews the recent advances on performance indices, classification, structural composition, optimization and modeling method, and control of PEACM. First, the gripper's performance indices and classifications are elaborated, which is beneficial to determine the design goal. Then, the compliant mechanisms adopted in the microgripper design are discussed, including the flexible hinge, displacement amplifier, and guiding mechanism. In addition, the optimization and modeling methods of the microgripper are presented. Popular types of position/force sensors and different displacement/force control strategies employed in the microgripper are surveyed. Moreover, the prospect on future development trend of the PEACM is discussed. The paper provides the reader with an overview of the recent advances on PEACM design and also a guideline on further development of the microgripper.

Recent design and development of piezoelectric-actuated compliant microgrippers: A review

Design of compliant mechanisms using continuum topology optimization: A review

This paper presents a piezo-driven microgripper which can realize parallel grasping in a large displacement range (more than 140 μ m ). The proposed microgripper is derived by a two-step nonlinear topology optimization method. A conventional linear topology optimization problem with loose boundary condition is solved first, and its solution is used as the initial design domain of the following nonlinear topology optimization. The comparison of the convergence results shows that this method can find a better structure of microgripper and save computation time simultaneously. Both the finite element analysis and experiment are used to verify the performance of the proposed microgripper. The experimental results show that the parasitic movement of the jaw is only 0.299 % of the grasping movement and the average inclination angle of the jaw is 0.055mrad/ μ m . A pair of strain gages is integrated as a displacement sensor, and its performance is presented and verified by experiments.

Nonlinear topology optimization of parallel-grasping microgripper

Topology optimization has emerged as a powerful tool for structural configuration design. To further promote the development of topology optimization, many computer programs have been published for educational purposes over the past decades. However, most of the computer programs are constructed based on a linear assumption. This paper presents an 89-line code for nonlinear topology optimization written in FreeFEM based on the popular SIMP (solid isotropic material with penalization) method. Excluding thirteen lines which are used for explanation, only 76 lines are needed for the initialization of the design parameters, nonlinear finite element analysis, sensitivity calculation, and updated design variables. Different design problems can be solved by modifying several lines in the proposed program. The complete program is given in the Appendix and is intended for educational purposes only.

An 89-line code for geometrically nonlinear topology optimization written in FreeFEM

\n Standard moving morphable component (MMC)-based topology optimization methods use free components with explicitly geometrical parameters as design units to obtain the optimal structural topology by moving, deforming, and covering such components. In this study, we intend to present a method for geometrically nonlinear explicit topology optimization using moving wide-Bézier components with constrained ends. Not only can the method efficiently avoid the convergence issues associated with nonlinear structural response analysis, but it can also alleviate the component disconnection issues associated with the standard MMC-based topology optimization methods. The numerical investigations proposed in this work indicate that the proposed method allows us to obtain results in accordance with the current literature with a more stable optimization process. In addition, the proposed method can easily achieve minimum length scale control without adding constraints.

Junwen Liang

Papers

Design of compliant mechanisms using continuum topology optimization: A review

Nonlinear topology optimization of parallel-grasping microgripper

An 89-line code for geometrically nonlinear topology optimization written in FreeFEM

An Approach for Geometrically Nonlinear Topology Optimization Using Moving Wide-Bézier Components With Constrained Ends

Design of compliant mechanisms: An explicit topology optimization method using end-constrained spline curves with variable width