3D Printed Auxetic Mechanical Metamaterial with Chiral Cells and Re-entrant Cores

By combining the two basic deformation mechanisms for auxetic open-cell metamaterials, re-entrant angle and chirality, new hybrid chiral mechanical metamaterials are designed and fabricated via a multi-material 3D printer. Results from mechanical experiments on the 3D printed prototypes and systematic Finite Element (FE) simulations show that the new designs can achieve subsequential cell-opening mechanism under a very large range of overall strains (2.91%–52.6%). Also, the effective stiffness, the Poisson’s ratio and the cell-opening rate of the new designs can be tuned in a wide range by tailoring the two independent geometric parameters: the cell size ratio c0/b0\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${{\boldsymbol{c}}}_{{\bf{0}}}{\boldsymbol{/}}{{\boldsymbol{b}}}_{{\bf{0}}}$$\end{document}, and re-entrant angle θ. As an example application, a sequential particle release mechanism of the new designs was also systematically explored. This mechanism has potential application in drug delivery. The present new design concepts can be used to develop new multi-functional smart composites, sensors and/or actuators which are responsive to external load and/or environmental conditions.