Systematic design of compliant morphing structures: a phase-field approach

The paper studies how to design compliant structures that can change shape when exposed to an external stimulus. The structures are described as being made from materials that react to that stimulus. To make the design problem well-posed, the authors add a perimeter penalty term to ensure solutions exist. They then replace a sharp-interface formulation with a phase-field approximation. They prove that the phase-field approximation converges as the regularization length goes to zero and provide an efficient numerical implementation. The approach is illustrated using a series of numerical examples.