Free vibration analysis of PLA based auxetic metamaterial structural composite using finite element analysis

The unique engineered material termed Metamaterials is not seen naturally and were made artificially by repeating unit cell geometry in multiple directions to form a structural composite metamaterial. The present research is to investigate the three types of uniform architecture metamaterials i.e square, auxetic and honeycomb along with three of its hybrids i.e square-auxetic, auxetic-honeycomb and square-honeycomb. All the modelled metamaterials samples were imported to Ansys modal analysis section and free vibration analysis is performed under the workbench graphic user interface via the finite element method. The materials for the simulation test is PLA (polylactic acid) adopted. The results like natural frequency and mode shapes are extracted from the simulation. It was observed that among hybrids the highest natural frequency was seen for auxetic-square hybrid geometry i.e 858 Hz at 3rd natural frequency, which decreased to 35 and 44% when compared to square-honeycomb, auxetic-honeycomb respectively. The emerging area potential application of hybrid PLA auxetic metamaterial includes robotics, aerospace, nautical, sports and bio-medical industries. © 2021