A comprehensive investigation of compressive behavior of architectured materials based on topologically interlocking structures: Experimental and numerical approaches

Abstract

Topologically Interlocked Materials (TIMs) are a part of architectured materials, which could impressively overcome several limitations of monolithic plates such as crack propagation. A critical requirement for these bio-inspired structures is the existence of a compressive loading that may have a side influence on plates made of TIMs, if it gets close enough to the buckling critical force of the plates. In the current study, buckling instability of these plates are investigated using a combination of mechanical testing on 3D printed samples and finite element analysis. According to the results, despite the fact that the segmentation of monolithic plates with constant aspect ratios, reduces the stiffness of the entire structure, the range of their variations can increase up to more than double. In addition, this observation has demonstrated that the geometry of block individually, can increase the buckling resistance of plates up to 3 times or may even reverse their behavior completely with respect to the number of blocks. Moreover, obtained results have shown that the failure of architectured plates is much more dependent on the blocks’ material in comparison with the frictional coefficient.