Abstract
Parallel to the early development and recent widespread usage of composite materials in building and manufacturing, the concept of functionally graded materials (FGM) was initiated and developed as far back as the 1980s. In contrast to the composite paradigm, where layers of materials are glued and ‘cooked’ together under high pressure and temperature to form laminated parts, FGM are singular materials that vary their consistency gradually over their volume. In direct link to their increasing use in fields adjacent to architecture, the scope of the paper is to explore possible design routes for designing with FGM. Of a limited number of available CAD software in which material properties can be graded, the intent of the design for a materially graded windbreak module, as well as a multi-material skin-to-structure connection, is to utilize particle systems as a technique for simulating fields of interacting, information-loaded material point sets that can be fused together in a gradient manner.
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