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Selective laser melting (SLM) is an additive manufacturing process which enables the creation of intricate components from high performance alloys. This facilitates the design and fabrication of new cellular materials for blast and impact mitigation, where the performance is heavily influenced by geometric and material sensitivities. Design of such materials requires an understanding of the relationship between the additive manufacturing process and material properties at different length scales: from the microstructure, to geometric feature rendition, to overall dynamic performance. To date, there remain significant uncertainties about both the potential benefits and pitfalls of using additive manufacturing processes to design and optimise cellular materials for dynamic energy absorbing applications. This investigation focuses on the out-of-plane compression of stainless steel cellular materials fabricated using SLM, and makes two specific contributions. First, it demonstrates how the SLM process itself influences the characteristics of these cellular materials across a range of length scales, and in turn, how this influences the dynamic deformation. Secondly, it demonstrates how an additive manufacturing route can be used to add geometric complexity to the cell architecture, creating a versatile basis for geometry optimisation. Two design spaces are explored in this work: a conventional square honeycomb hybridised with lattice walls, and an auxetic stacked-origami geometry, manufactured and tested experimentally here for the first time. It is shown that the hybrid lattice-honeycomb geometry outperformed the benchmark metallic square honeycomb in terms of energy absorption efficiency in the intermediate impact velocity regime (approximately 100 m/s). In this regime, the collapse is dominated by dynamic buckling effects, but wave propagation effects have yet to become pronounced. By tailoring the fold angles of the stacked origami material, numerical simulations illustrated how it can be optimised for specific impact velocity regimes between 10-150 m/s. Practical design tools were then developed based on these results.

"Mammalian skeletal muscle is a very complicated biological structure to model due to its non-homogeneous and non-linear material properties as well as its complex geometry. Finite element discrete one-dimensional Hill-based elements are largely used to simulate muscles in both passive and active states. There are, however, several shortfalls to utilizing one-dimensional elements, such as the impossibility to represent muscle physical mass and complex lines of action. Additionally, the use of one-dimensional elements restricts muscle insertion sites to a limited number of nodes causing unrealistic loading distributions in the bones. The behavior of various finite element muscle models was investigated and compared to manually calculated muscle behavior. An improved finite element muscle model consisting of shell elements and Hill-based contractile truss elements in series and parallel was ultimately developed. The muscles of the thigh were then modeled and integrated into an existing 50th percentile musculo-skeletal model of the knee-thigh-hip complex. Impact simulations representing full frontal car crashes were then conducted on the model and the pre-loading effects from active thigh muscles on the femur were investigated and compared to cadaver sled test data. It was found that the active muscles produced a pre-load femoral axial force that acted to slightly stabilize the rate of stress intensification on critical stress areas on the femur. Additionally, the active muscles served to direct the distribution of stress to more concentrated areas on the femoral neck. Furthermore, the pre-load femoral axial force suggests that a higher percentage of injuries to the knee-thigh-hip complex may be due to the effects of active muscles on the femur. "