Computational Design of Intelligent Material and Structural Systems: From Topology Optimization to Industriali

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Computational Design of Intelligent Material and Structural Systems: From Topology Optimization to Industrialized Construction
Speaker: Chao Wang
Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in Civil Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA

Industrialized construction is transforming the building environment, demanding structural design methodologies that integrate performance,
manufacturability, and automation for prefabricated systems. This talk presents a unified computational design framework focusing
on topology optimization for intelligent material and structural systems. We present physics-based inverse design methods combined with
nonlinear mechanics modeling for designing materials with targeted mechanical responses. This method can be integrated with
manufacturing consideration, including path-planning strategies for additive manufacturing, providing a direct pipeline from computational
design to fabrication for industrialized construction. The effectiveness of the optimized designs has been demonstrated in applications such as
soft robotics, biomedical devices, and resilient structures. This design framework opens new opportunities for industrialized
construction engineering. Topology optimization combined with robotic additive manufacturing enables automated design of large-scale 3Dprinted
structures, where structural performance and printability are considered simultaneously. Similar ideas extend to modular and
prefabricated systems, where structural design can be coupled with transportation and assembly constraints. In addition, integrating AI with
topology optimization, through data-driven surrogate models or physics-informed neural networks, offers new approaches to improve
the generality of designing complex structural systems.