The engineering elastic constants of bio-inspired sandwich cores with wavy cylinders

Abstract

Beetle Elytron Plates (BEPs) represent a new class of biomimetic sandwich cores with excellent mechanical properties and inspired by the internal structure of the beetle elytra. The cores have a hexagonal centre-symmetric configuration with through-thickness cylinders in the unit cell. The present work describes the behaviour of the engineering elastic constants of an evolution of these BEP topologies that feature cylinders with waviness. These BEP core configurations are simulated using Finite Element models, with periodic boundary conditions for volumetric homogenization. The models are then used to perform a parametric analysis against the geometry characteristics of the new cellular configurations. This work further explores the potential design space of BEP cellular metamaterials by altering the geometry of the trabeculae and facilitates further investigation into the mechanical properties of these new BEP topologies with wave-shaped units. Although – and as expected - the specific nondimensional out-of-plane tensile modulus has values here close to unity, BEP topologies with out-of-plane wave-shaped cylinders show enhanced in-plane moduli values than classical straight cylinder configurations, except for the Young's modulus of MBEP cores with only one semi-wave. The same trend is observed for the nondimensional Young's modulus of EBEP configurations, whereas the situation is opposite for the MBEP topologies. The nondimensional out-of-plane shear modulus decreases for both EBEP and MBEP configurations compared to the straight cylinder cores.