Cesogen: cellular solid generator

Cellular solids are structures which have applications in mechanical engineering to make lightweight structures and heat exchangers, in biomedical engineering to make tissue scaffolds, and in chemical engineering to make catalysts. A subset of these, triply periodic minimal surface–like cellular solids, are seeing growing adoption with recent advances in additive manufacturing. Here we present a program, Cesogen, which interprets a novel domain-specific language (DSL) for specifying signed distance functions (SDFs) to generate cellular solid meshes, and which is designed to be paired with blackbox optimizers in order to spur more efficient research into cellular solids. It converts input meshes to SDFs before transforming and combining them with operations such as translation, scaling and intersection, which allows Cesogen to robustly generate hierarchical cellular solids. Finally, Cesogen contours the combined SDF via marching cubes to produce a resulting mesh which can be fed to a physics simulator.

Uncontrolled Keywords

• cellular solids
• triply periodic minimal surfaces
• signed distance functions
• additive manufacturing
• blackbox optimization