Shape-morphing programming of soft materials on complex geometries via neural operator
This work addresses the problem of designing advanced shape-morphing applications like conformal implants or aerodynamic morphing for engineers and material scientists, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The researchers tackled the challenge of programming shape-morphing soft materials on complex geometries by developing a Spectral and Spatial Neural Operator (S2NO) that integrates Laplacian eigenfunction encoding and spatial convolutions to predict high-fidelity morphing behaviors, enabling voxel-level optimization and super-resolution material distribution design.
Shape-morphing soft materials can enable diverse target morphologies through voxel-level material distribution design, offering significant potential for various applications. Despite progress in basic shape-morphing design with simple geometries, achieving advanced applications such as conformal implant deployment or aerodynamic morphing requires accurate and diverse morphing designs on complex geometries, which remains challenging. Here, we present a Spectral and Spatial Neural Operator (S2NO), which enables high-fidelity morphing prediction on complex geometries. S2NO effectively captures global and local morphing behaviours on irregular computational domains by integrating Laplacian eigenfunction encoding and spatial convolutions. Combining S2NO with evolutionary algorithms enables voxel-level optimisation of material distributions for shape morphing programming on various complex geometries, including irregular-boundary shapes, porous structures, and thin-walled structures. Furthermore, the neural operator's discretisation-invariant property enables super-resolution material distribution design, further expanding the diversity and complexity of morphing design. These advancements significantly improve the efficiency and capability of programming complex shape morphing.