A New Polymer-Based Mechanical Metamaterial with Tailorable Large Negative Poisson's Ratios

Shanshi Gao; Weidong Liu; Liangchi Zhang; Asit Kumar Gain

doi:10.3390/polym12071492

A New Polymer-Based Mechanical Metamaterial with Tailorable Large Negative Poisson's Ratios

Polymers (Basel). 2020 Jul 3;12(7):1492. doi: 10.3390/polym12071492.

Authors

Shanshi Gao¹, Weidong Liu¹, Liangchi Zhang^{1

2}, Asit Kumar Gain¹

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory for Precision and Nano Processing Technologies, School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of New South Wales, NSW 2052 Sydney, Australia.
² Department of Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, 518055 Shenzhen, China.

Abstract

Mechanical metamaterials have attracted significant attention due to their programmable internal structure and extraordinary mechanical properties. However, most of them are still in their prototype stage without direct applications. This research developed an easy-to-use mechanical metamaterial with tailorable large negative Poisson's ratios. This metamaterial was microstructural, with cylindrical-shell-based units and was manufactured by the 3D-printing technique. It was found numerically that the present metamaterial could achieve large negative Poisson's ratios up to -1.618 under uniaxial tension and -1.657 under uniaxial compression, and the results of the following verification tests agreed with simulation findings. Moreover, stress concentration in this new metamaterial is much smaller than that in most of existing re-entrance metamaterials.

Keywords: 3D printing; finite element analysis; metamaterial; negative Poisson′s ratio; uniaxial tension/compression.