A Unit Cell Design Guideline Development Method for Meso-Scaled Periodic Cellular Material Structures

Abstract

Much research has been conducted on effective elastic properties of meso-scaled periodic cellular material (MPCM) structures; however, there is only limited research providing guidelines on how to develop improved unit cell (UC) topologies and shapes for a given set of loading requirements and conditions. This paper presents guidelines to improve the shear flexibility of the MPCMs while maintaining the effective shear modules by changing the topology or the shape of a unit cell. The guidelines are intended to use design knowledge for helping engineers by providing recommendations at any stage of the design process. In this paper, the guidelines are developed by changing topology characteristics to achieve a desired effective property of the MPCM structure. The effects of individual members, such as side connection, transverse connection, vertical legs, and curved beams of MPCM structure, when subjected to the in-plane shear loading are investigated through conducting a set of numerical simulation on UCs with similar topology and shape characteristics. Based on the simulation results, the unit cell design guidelines are developed to provide recommendations to engineers on improving the shear flexure of MPCM during the design process. Ultimately, a unit cell design guideline development method is offered and demonstrated by developing two new design guidelines.

Dispersion Analysis of Metasurfaces With Hexagonal Lattices With Higher Symmetries

“…In recent years, more attention has been paid to periodic structures formed by non-rectangular unit cells because they provide additional design flexibilities and could potentially improve the performance of the periodic structures, among which hexagonal periodic structures have gained additional attention. Although the use of hexagonal periodic structures is common practice in material science [24], [25], [26], in lens design at microwave frequencies they have also shown their ability to reduce anisotropy and provide better performance compared to square metasurfaces [27]. In [28] a hexagonal periodic bandgap structure is combined with a microstrip antenna to expand its operating bandwidth.…”

Anisotropic hyperelastic constitutive modeling of in-plane finite deformation responses of commercial composite hexagonal honeycombs

“…In recent years, honeycomb cores have been adopted for designing more structural functional applications such as flexible cellular meso-structures with high deformation recovery [ 11–14 ], meta-structures having negative Poisson’s ratio for high energy absorption applications [ 15,16 ], etc . In these applications honeycomb cores are subjected to large in-plane deformations.…”