UC Irvine

Triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMSs) have long been studied by mathematicians but have recently garnered significant interest from the engineering community as ideal topologies for shell-based architected materials with both mechanical and functional applications. Here, we present a TPMS generator, MiniSurf. It combines surface visualization and CAD file generation (for both finite element modeling and additive manufacturing) within one single GUI. MiniSurf presently can generate 19 built-in and one user-defined triply periodic minimal surfaces based on their level-set surface approximations. Users can fully control the periodicity and precision of the generated surfaces. We show that MiniSurf can potentially be a very useful tool in designing and fabricating architected materials.