Symmetry Based Material Optimization

Many man-made or natural objects are composed of symmetric parts and possess symmetric physical behavior. Although its shape can exactly follow a symmetry in the designing or modeling stage, its discretized mesh in the analysis stage may be asymmetric because generating a mesh exactly following the symmetry is usually costly. As a consequence, the expected symmetric physical behavior may not be faithfully reproduced due to the asymmetry of the mesh. To solve this problem, we propose to optimize the material parameters of the mesh for static and kinematic symmetry behavior. Specifically, under the situation of static equilibrium, Young's modulus is properly scaled so that a symmetric force field leads to symmetric displacement. For kinematics, the mass is optimized to reproduce symmetric acceleration under a symmetric force field. To efficiently measure the deviation from symmetry, we formulate a linear operator whose kernel contains all the symmetric vector fields, which helps to characterize the asymmetry error via a simple l(2) norm. To make the resulting material suitable for the general situation, the symmetric training force fields are derived from modal analysis in the above kernel space. Results show that our optimized material significantly reduces the asymmetric error on an asymmetric mesh in both static and dynamic simulations.