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Abstract Owing to the fact that effective properties of low‐density cellular solids heavily rely on their underlying architecture, a variety of explicit and implicit techniques exists for designing cellular geometries. However, most of these techniques fail to present a correlation among architecture, internal forces, and effective properties. This paper introduces an alternative design strategy based on the static equilibrium of forces, equilibrium of polyhedral frames, and reciprocity of form and force. This novel approach reveals a geometric relationship among the truss system architecture, topological dual, and equilibrium of forces on the basis of 3D graphic statics. This technique is adapted to devise periodic strut‐based cellular architectures under certain boundary conditions and they are manipulated to construct shell‐based (shellular) cells with a variety of mechanical properties. By treating the materialized unit cells as representative volume elements (RVE), multiscale homogenization is used to investigate their effective linear elastic properties. Validated by experimental tests on 3D printed funicular materials, it is shown that by manipulating the RVE topology using the proposed methodology, alternative strut materialization schemes, and rational addition of bracing struts, cellular mechanical metamaterials can be systematically architected to demonstrate properties ranging from bending‐ to stretching‐dominated, realize metafluidic behavior, or create novel hybrid shellulars.
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The Anisotropic Yield Surface of Cellular Materials
The use of mechanical metamaterials in engineering applications is often limited because of uncertainty regarding their deformation behavior. This uncertainty necessitates large safety factors and assumptions about their behavior to be included in mechanical designs including metamaterials, which detracts from their greatest benefit, viz. their ultralight weight. In this study, a yield envelope was created for both a bending-dominated and a stretching-dominated cellular material topology to improve the understanding of the response of cellular materials under various load types and orientations. Experimental studies revealed that the shear strength of a cellular material is significantly lower than that predicted by Mohr’s criterion, necessitating a modification of the Mohr’s yield criterion for cellular materials. All topologies experienced tension–compression anisotropy and topology orientation anisotropy during loading, with the stretching-dominated topology experiencing the largest anisotropies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1834081
- PAR ID:
- 10403977
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- JOM
- ISSN:
- 1543-1851
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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