Status and Challenges in Homogenization Methods for Lattice Materials

Lattice structures have shown great potential in that mechanical properties are customizable without changing the material itself. Lattice materials could be light and highly stiff as well. With this flexibility of designing structures without raw material processing, lattice structures have been widely used in various applications such as smart and functional structures in aerospace and computational mechanics. Conventional methodologies for understanding behaviors of lattice materials take numerical approaches such as FEA (finite element analysis) and high-fidelity computational tools including ANSYS and ABAQUS. However, they demand a high computational load in each geometry run. Among many other methodologies, homogenization is another numerical approach but that enables to model behaviors of bulk lattice materials by analyzing either a small portion of them using numerical regression for rapid processing. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of representative homogenization methodologies and their status and challenges in lattice materials with their fundamentals.