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This paper introduces a generative design framework utilizing Neural Cellular Automata to create disordered metamaterials with complex microstructures through learned local interaction rules. By requiring only a single training template, the method allows for the generation of diverse microstructures that adapt to irregular domains and arbitrary discretizations, offering control over properties like orientation and anisotropy without the need for retraining. The approach is exemplified in a multiscale mechanical cloaking design, achieving superior performance and flexibility compared to traditional methods, thus unlocking new applications in biomedical implants and soft robotics.
A single training template can yield a wide variety of disordered microstructures, enabling unprecedented control over material properties without retraining.
Disordered metamaterials feature microstructures with inherent randomness and irregularity, enabling them to achieve broader property coverage and superior performance unavailable in their regular counterparts. Despite their promise, designing disordered microstructures is substantially harder than designing regular ones. Their design remains trapped between manual parameterizations with limited expressiveness, and generative AI that is data-hungry and struggles to generalize. To address these limitations, we propose a generative design framework based on Neural Cellular Automata that dynamically grows complex microstructures through learned local interaction rules, inspired by the self-organizing processes in natural materials. This framework requires only a single training template, yet accommodates diverse disordered microstructures and adapts to irregular domains and arbitrary discretizations. By manipulating the learned local rules, we can steer the growth process to generate microstructures unseen during training, providing control over orientation, anisotropy, and directional thickness without retraining. As a dynamic, local growth process, it naturally produces spatially varying microstructures that transition smoothly to enable location-specific mechanical properties. We demonstrate this in a multiscale mechanical cloaking design, where microstructures vary across the space to meet an optimized heterogeneous property distribution. Our design enables excellent cloaking performance without complicated post-processing and incompatible assembly common in existing methods. This data-efficient, generalizable approach opens access to previously intractable disordered materials for biomedical implants and soft robotics.
