Engineering the Mechanics of Heterogeneous Soft Crystals

Abstract

This work demonstrates how the geometric and topological characteristics of substructures within heterogeneous materials can be employed to tailor the mechanical responses of soft crystals under large strains. The large deformation mechanical behaviors of elastomeric composites possessing long-range crystalline order are examined using both experiments on 3D printed prototype materials and precisely matched numerical simulations. The deformation mechanisms at small and large strains were elucidated for six sets of morphologies: dispersed-particles on each of the simple cubic, body-centered cubic or facecentered cubic lattices, and their bi-continuous counterparts. Comparison of results for the six types of morphologies revealed that the topological connectivity of dissimilar domains is of critical importance for tailoring the macroscopic mechanical properties and the mechanical anisotropy.

Multiscale Toughening Mechanisms in Biological Materials and Bioinspired Designs

“…The most commonly used printers are extrusion or UV‐cured polymer‐based printers. Multimaterial printers can blend different polymers to achieve more fine‐tuned material properties . However, given that the field is still immature, there are shortcomings and artifacts present in the resulting prints.…”

Material characterisation of additively manufactured elastomers at different strain rates and build orientations

“…The existing material models of PolyJet elastomers in the literature are widely inconsistent as their time-dependency is often oversimplified [27,28] or entirely overlooked [29][30][31][32][33]. A recent study collected the shear modulus of several of the existing material models for T+ and reported a variation from 0.158 -0.330 MPa [27].…”

“…A recent study collected the shear modulus of several of the existing material models for T+ and reported a variation from 0.158 -0.330 MPa [27]. Reasons for this could be that studies regarded Tango (T) and T+ as linear elastic [33,34] or purely hyperelastic using Neo-Hookean [30] or Arruda-Boyce material models [35], disregarding their time-dependent behaviour. The majority of studies which have explored PolyJet elastomers have focused on their time-independent behaviour [14,27,36].…”

Role of the Intercrystalline Tie Chains Network in the Mechanical Response of Semicrystalline Polymers

“…Predicting the functional dependence of the moduli on structural parameters Φ c , f tie , and N=N e , however, remains a challenge for theories of polymer deformation. Furthermore, the insights from this study could be relevant for composite polymeric materials with ordered regions connected by linkers [21] or biopolymer networks consisting of regions of ordered beta sheets embedded in an amorphous network [22,23].…”