Back in 2001, a profound discussion was held in ANU’s beautiful Unihouse gardens about how useful a bicontinuous bottle, a bottle internally subdivided by a minimal surface into two domains, could be. One channel for each of your favourite drinks, or one for olive oil and one for vinegar. Read more
Models of the single and double gyroid, clipped within a 14-sided polyhedron.
These are the voxelised datasets that were used for FEM calculations of effective elastic properties and for Lattice Boltzmann calculations of permeabilities in our article
(Click here for Sebastian Kapfer’s page for voxelised data sets)
These data sets were used to obtain the following result which even now (in 2019) I consider quite amazing: “As the key result of this article, we have shown that, at the same solid volume fraction, sheet solids have a subs
tantially higher effective bulk modulus k and direction-averaged Young’s modulus E than network solids, for a wide range of volume fractions and material parameters. While a comprehensive explanation of this behavior is elusive, it can be compared to the differences between hollow steel pipes and solid steel struts with respect to bending rigidity. In civil engineering, it is a well-known fact that at equal material usage, a hollow cylinder is preferrable to a solid cylindrical strut; the moment of inertia of the beam cross-section enters the bending rigidity. Minimal surface sheets act as the triply-periodic analogon of the hollow pipe, whereas network solids are representing networks of solid cylindrical struts.”