An infill-based approach towards stiffer auxetic lattices: Design and study of enhanced in-plane elastic properties

Mechanical metamaterials have tunable material properties, and the architecture of such materials can be tuned to impart Negative Poisson's Ratio (NPR). However, architected lattices typically have low stiffness. In the current study, the filler-based and infill-based strategies for creating auxetic lattices with enhanced stiffness are proposed and demonstrated. Analytic expressions for different in-plane elastic properties of the sinusoidal re-entrant honeycomb (SRH) lattice are developed. Finite element models are validated using data from published literature and analytic models. Using validated FE modelling, parametric studies involving infill patterns and filler materials in the SRH lattices are undertaken to find combinations leading to enhanced stiffness with minor loss in auxeticity. The possibility of attaining a massive increment in stiffness than that of the empty lattices, while retaining significant auxeticity (Poisson's ratio < -1), is demonstrated, which is a key outcome of this work. Using the proposed approach, high stiffness has been achieved in case of both non-auxetic infill-based (NAIB) and auxetic infill-based (AIB) while retaining NPR is established. Further studies have confirmed that the AIB lattices exhibit much higher stiffness compared to all the other lattices. Finally, the proposed approach is benchmarked against four published approaches towards generating stiff lattices with NPR. When compared with existing approaches, it is found that the strategies proposed in this paper perform better; for the same NPR, the proposed approaches lead to lattices with higher stiffness, and conversely, for the same normalised stiffness higher auxeticity is achieved. Implementation of the proposed approaches can be realized using in-built infill capabilities of prevalent additive manufacturing 3D printing technologies. New opportunities to enhance the capabilities of the existing technology are also indicated.