Traditionally, two strategies were carried out to reduce structural weight:
increasing the specific properties of materials;
optimizing the architectural design.
IRP3, Weight saving engineering for structural applications, promotes strategies to satisfy engineering specifications for structural applications while using the minimum quantity of material. The optimisation of the design of lattice structures and their capacity to introduce them in industrial components has been well investigated in the past funding period. In the renewal, we aim to improve durability and multifunctionality of different types of architecture in three directions:
A first research axis concerns the adaptation of coating technologies for lattice structures. In addition to the study of coatings for the design of their corrosion resistance, we investigate the coating of lattice structures for promoting cell activity into scaffolds for bone surgery applications.
Another research axis is the development of “adaptive” architectures by using alloys displaying stress induced phase transformation (e.g. TRIP/TWIP alloys), in order to optimize the compromise between antagonistic strength and deformability. This concept of “adaptive” architectures is increasingly used today in the case of polymers or bio architectures but remains poorly developed in the case of metallic alloys.
A third axis, initiated in the past period, is to develop locally controlled microstructures (e.g. hierarchical microstructures) and phase distributions for optimising both mechanical behaviour and functional properties.
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