Design of meta-materials for digital fabrication

Meta-materials are materials that owe their bulk properties primarily from their geometric structure. Designing meta-materials with extremal properties is a challenging task and is usually done by hand. In this talk, I will present  a pipeline to (1) automatically characterize the range -- or gamut -- of mechanical properties that can be achieved by assemblies of 3D-printed voxels of base materials, (2) automatically identify microstructures sharing common geometric traits and cluster them into distinct families, and (3) to generate parametric templates for each family allowing to represent the microstructures at arbitrary resolutions. I will also present some recent work on the design of interpolable microstructures based on star-shaped metrics.