Lattice Materials with Reversible Foldability

Abstract

The authors introduce a new class of lattice materials, where a controlled simultaneous folding of the lattice walls results in a significant size reduction while preserving the overall shape of the original lattice. This reversible folding scheme results in 67 and 50% reduction in size at each level for lattices with triangular and square grid topologies, respectively, while the design enables multiple levels of folding to achieve a desired final size. The authors study the elastic properties and the phononic band structure of the lattice at different stages of folding, using analytical and finite element methods. The proposed concept provides new opportunities for the development of multifunctional deployable structures through significant changes in the size and properties of lattice materials by folding.

Shear band propagation in honeycombs: numerical and experimental

“…Recent advances in additive manufacturing allow parts of high complexity, such as cellular solids (Gibson and Ashby, 1998) and lattice structures (Gorguluarslan et al , 2016), to be built in relatively short time scales, high qualities and affordable costs comparing with conventional manufacturing processes. State of the art 3D-printing techniques have enabled engineers to fabricate tailor-made structures for diverse applications from biomimetic-based applications, for instance, the fabrication of fish armors (Porter et al , 2016) and bone tissue implants (Murr et al , 2010; Arafat et al , 2013; Domingos et al , 2014), to other novel engineering applications, for instance, the fabrication of wind turbine sandwich panels (Thomsen, 2009; Jones, 2016), reconfigurable structures (Haghpanah et al , 2016; Ebrahimi et al , 2017) and lattice-based structures (Gorguluarslan et al , 2017). Because of the large impact and wide range of applications, the design of lattice-based structures for implementation in the components of engineering parts has seen a rapid development during the past few years (Moongkhamklang et al , 2010; Yan et al , 2012; Vigliotti and Pasini, 2012; Vigliotti and Pasini, 2013; Hosseinabadi et al , 2017; Gorguluarslan et al , 2017).…”