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：具有可随深空恶劣环境条件按需调整的柔性物理化学性质的材料，将成为定义未来太空探索的关键。自然界中复杂的微结构与晶格几何为设计环境特异性材料提供了富有前景的灵感来源。然而，此类不规则拓扑结构所覆盖的庞大设计空间难以通过解析方法进行探测。正因如此，迄今为止大多数合成晶格材料仍基于周期性架构。本文提出一种计算框架，采用图表示法统一描述规则与不规则晶格材料。该方法通过可微消息传递算法计算机械性能，从而能够利用自动微分技术调整单个晶格单元的几何结构与属性，以设计具有目标特性的材料。该引入方法适用于任何可用异构图表示的系统，包括其他类型的材料。