Abstract
Lightweight metastructures are designed consisting of prismatic tensegrity building blocks which have excellent strength-to-weight ratio and also enable unique compression-torsion coupling. A theoretical model with a coupled axial-torsional stiffness is first developed to study the band structures of the proposed lightweight metastructures. Then, various unit cell designs are investigated for bandgap generations at desired frequency ranges. Broadband full-wave attenuation is found in the tensegrity metastructure with special opposite-chirality. Furthermore, tunable stiffness in the prismatic tensegrity structure is investigated and ‘small-on-large’ tunability is achieved in the metastructure by harnessing the geometrically nonlinear deformation through an external control torque. Prestress adjustment is also investigated for fine tuning of the band structure. Finally, frequency response tests on the finite metastructures are preformed to validate their wave attenuation ability as well as their wave propagation tunability. The proposed tensegrity metastructures could be very useful in various engineering applications where lightweight and tunable structures with broadband vibration suspension and wave attenuation ability are in high demand.
Highlights
Tensegrity structures are lightweight spatial structures with a highly efficient material utilization and can form minimal mass systems with satisfying load-bearing capabilities[1,2,3,4,5]
It consists two parallel equilateral triangles at the top and bottom ends, which are connected with three Nylon cross-strings and three polylactic acid (PLA) bars in a right-handed chiral fashion
A reference configuration of the prismatic tensegrity structure (PTS) is provided in Fig. 1b, where the displacement between the midpoint and the nodes of the equilateral triangles, the height of the PTS and the relative angle of the two equilateral triangles are R, h and φ, respectively
Summary
Tensegrity structures are lightweight spatial structures with a highly efficient material utilization and can form minimal mass systems with satisfying load-bearing capabilities[1,2,3,4,5]. One can expect interesting and practically tunable elastic wave functions in tensegrity-based metastructure where geometric nonlinearity can be found intrinsically in those lightweight structures.
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