Continuous fiber reinforced meta-composites with tailorable Poisson’s ratio and effective elastic modulus: Design and experiment

Abstract

Auxetic metamaterials, i.e., with negative Poisson’s ratio are attracting increasing attention. This study develops a novel method to design and investigate continuous fiber-reinforced meta-composites with tailorable negative Poisson’s ratio and effective elastic modulus. First, the design scheme based on parametric level set method, is proposed by combining fast marching method, filtering technology and matrix rotation for attaining the two-dimensional isotropic composites. A novel objective function considering both negative Poisson’s ratio and effective elastic modulus is introduced and the result demonstrate that it is effective to not only accelerate the numerical convergence but also achieve a larger negative Poisson’s ratio when compared with that using the currently-used objective function. By tailoring a weight ratio for balancing the negative Poisson’s ratio and effective elastic modulus, a general contradictive trend was captured. Experimentally, the specimens are accordingly fabricated via 3D printing. Then, the axial compression tests are performed with the aid of digital image correlation technology to characterize the deformation behaviors and evaluate the mechanical properties of the designed meta-composites. Experimental results show that, as the weight ratio increases from 0.02 to 1.57, the effective elastic modulus increases from 180.5 MPa to 310.3 MPa (enhanced by 71.9 %) while the negative Poisson’s ratio decreases from − 0.41 to − 0.036 (reduced by 91.4 %), proving the effectiveness of the design method. The design methods and experimental results can provide effective approaches and important information for designing novel continuous fiber reinforced meta-composites with tailorable mechanical performance.