Experimental and Numerical Analysis of Novel Polycontinuous Triply Periodic Minimal Surface Architectures

Triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) structures are architectures that possess unique geometrical features, like a smooth surface and zero-mean curvature. This article proposes two novel multivoid TPMS shell network structures, namely, IP and iBP based on I-WP, Primitive, and iBase architectures. A voxel-based approach is employed as a numerical homogenization method to calculate the mechanical and thermal properties of the structures. LCD 3D printing is employed for experimental validation which demonstrates close agreement with finite element analysis with ≈5% deviation in predicted elastic modulus. The proposed IP and iBP architectures exhibit up to 15% higher thermal conductivity compared to their base TPMS structures, while maintaining almost similar elastic modulus, with only a 4% deviation. Also, the directional elastic properties of the modified TPMS architectures have been examined by the Zener anisotropy index. Compared to the base structures, both architectures exhibit high anisotropy at volume fraction of 40%, but the anisotropy decreases drastically as volume fraction increases to 60%. Additionally, detailed geometrical analysis of these architectures indicates that they exhibit three void phases at specific TPMS parameters. The results demonstrate that the developed architectures have high potential to be employed in heat and mass transfer systems, including multifluid heat exchangers.