Coupled optimization of macroscopic structures and lattice infill

This article is concerned with the coupled optimization of the external boundary of a structure and its infill made of some graded lattice material. The lattice material is made of a periodic cell, macroscopically modulated and oriented. The external boundary may be coated by a layer of pure material with a fixed prescribed thickness. The infill is optimized by the homogenization method while the macroscopic shape is geometrically optimized by the Hadamard method of shape sensitivity. A first original feature of the proposed approach is that the infill material follows the displacement on the exterior boundary during the geometric optimization step. A second key feature is the dehomogenization or projection step which build a smoothly varying lattice infill from the optimal homogenized properties. Several numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of our approach in 2-d, which is especially convenient when considering design-dependent loads.