Mechanical Profile of Smooth Cellular Materials

Abstract

Cellular materials are critical elements for mechanical metamaterials design and fabrication. Tailoring the internal cellular material structural pattern can achieve a much broader range of bulk properties than the constituent materials, thus enabling the metamaterial design with extraordinary properties. Studying cellular materials’ mechanical properties is critical for understanding metamaterials’ structural design, and macroscale performances. This paper investigates and validates the mechanical properties of two classes of smooth cellular structures defined by deterministic and stochastic functions, respectively. A mechanical profile is proposed to depict the effective mechanical properties of these smooth cellular structures. We developed such profiles numerically based on computational homogenization and validated them by simulations and physical tests. In physical tests, we printed the generated structures on a fused deposition modeling (FDM) printer and conducted compression tests to verify the numerical homogenization and simulation results. Through the comparison studies, we summarize these cellular materials’ mechanical profiles defined by distinct principles. Based on the experimental results, several cellular structural design guidelines are derived for mechanical metamaterials development, which provides foundations for cellular materials database establishment and sheds light on future exotic metamaterials fabrication.