Architected lattice materials are some of the stiffest and strongest materials at ultra‐light density (<10 mg cm−3), but scalable manufacturing with high‐performance constituent materials remains a challenge that limits their widespread adoption in load‐bearing applications. We show mesoscale, ultra‐light (5.8 mg cm−3) fiber‐reinforced polymer composite lattice structures that are reversibly assembled from building blocks manufactured with a best‐practice high‐precision, high‐repeatability, and high‐throughput process: injection molding. Chopped glass fiber‐reinforced polymer (polyetherimide) lattice materials produced with this method display absolute stiffness (8.41 MPa) and strength (19 kPa) typically associated with metallic hollow strut microlattices at similar mass density. Additional benefits such as strain recovery, discrete damage repair with recovery of original stiffness and strength, and ease of modeling are demonstrated.

Ultralight materials present an opportunity to dramatically increase the efficiency of load-bearing aerostructures. To date, however, these ultralight materials have generally been confined to the laboratory bench-top, due to dimensional constraints of the manufacturing processes. We show a programmable material system applied as a large-scale, ultralight, and conformable aeroelastic structure. The use of a modular, lattice-based, ultralight material results in stiffness typical of an elastomer (2.6 MPa) at a mass density typical of an aerogel 5.6 mg cm 3 (). This, combined with a building block based manufacturing and configuration strategy, enables the rapid realization of new adaptive structures and mechanisms. The heterogeneous design with programmable anisotropy allows for enhanced elastic and global shape deformation in response to external loading, making it useful for tuned fluid-structure interaction. We demonstrate an example application experiment using two building block types for the primary structure of a 4.27 m wingspan aircraft, where we spatially program elastic shape morphing to increase aerodynamic efficiency and improve roll control authority, demonstrated with full-scale wind tunnel testing.

Aircraft weight is one of the most critical factors in the design and operation of modern vehicles. The ability to integrate ultra-light materials into the primary load bearing structures has the potential to reduce aircraft weight significantly. Ultralight materials tend to be latticebased meta-materials that are difficult and computationally expensive to model. One of the advantages of meta-materials is to be able to tune or "program" their bulk material properties through the placement of heterogeneous components in the material. A large amount of time devoted to the simulation in the development time for the tuning of the material can be a barrier to the adoption of large scale lattice materials. In this paper, we present a workflow and analysis tool-set to provide first-order estimates for rapid development of engineered lattice materials for aerospace applications. We present results for estimating the displacement and maximum structural stresses.