Materials possessing flexible physico-chemical properties that adapt on-demand to the hostile environmental conditions of deep space will become essential in defining the future of space exploration. A promising venue for inspiration towards the design of environment-specific materials is in the intricate micro-architectures and lattice geometry found throughout nature. However, the immense design space covered by such irregular topologies is challenging to probe analytically. For this reason, most synthetic lattice materials have to date been based on periodic architectures instead. Here, we propose a computational approach using a graph representation for both regular and irregular lattice materials. Our method uses differentiable message passing algorithms to calculate mechanical properties, and therefore allows using automatic differentiation to adjust both the geometric structure and attributes of individual lattice elements to design materials with desired properties. The introduced methodology is applicable to any system representable as a heterogeneous graph, including other types of materials.

翻译：拥有适应深空恶劣环境的柔性物理和化学性质的材料将成为定义太空探索未来的重要因素。对自然界中具有复杂微观结构和晶格几何图案的材料进行研究，可以为设计环境特定的材料提供灵感。然而，由于这种不规则拓扑的广阔设计空间无法进行分析探测，因此迄今为止大部分人工晶格材料都是基于周期性结构设计的。在此，我们提出了一种计算方法，使用图表示法来表示规则和不规则的晶格材料。我们的方法使用可微分的信息传递算法来计算机械性能，因此允许使用自动微分来调整单个晶格元素的几何结构和属性，以设计具有所需性能的材料。所介绍的方法适用于任何表示为异质图的系统，包括其他类型的材料。