Novel polyhedral mechanical metamaterial exhibiting negative Poisson’s ratio

Abstract

The work presents a novel polyhedral mechanical metamaterial based on rotating triangular prisms connected by their corners, which possesses the ability to attain large values of negative Poisson’s ratio (NPR). Through a kinematic model of the proposed rotating structure, we evaluate the auxeticity of the system by varying the geometrical parameters of the polyhedrons composing the elementary cell of the structure. The kinematic results highlight the peculiar NPR of the system, whose values are nearly constant over significant strain ranges. Focusing on the most promising auxetic mechanisms we designed chiral architectures that replace the ideal hinges at the corners with curved-shape ligaments, and validated these configurations through three-dimensional printed specimens. The specimens were tested under uniaxial compression and simulated through finite element analyses. Experimental results exhibited an excellent agreement with computational predictions in terms of elastic modulus and auxeticity, showing a value of Poisson’s ratio up to −1.3 for one of the designs. Our findings demonstrate the highly auxetic property of rotating polyhedral systems, which allow the design of novel architected materials useful, for example, in biomechanical applications.