In a new report now published in Science Advances, Mathias Oster, and a team of scientists at the Institute for Mathematics at the Berlin Institute of Technology and the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburg in the U.K., presented a three-periodic, chiral tensegrity structure and demonstrated that it is auxetic, i.e., such materials become thicker perpendicular to the applied force when stretched. An auxetic structure has a negative Poisson’s ratio and can form materials with unexpected behavior. The tensegrity structure is a form of tensile architecture held together by the balance of tensile and compression forces acting on them. The scientists constructed the tensegrity structure using chiral symmetry cylinder packing to transform cylinders to elastic elements and cylinder contacts to incompressible rods. The outcome showed local re-entrant geometry at its vertices, which they confirmed using finite element modeling. The architecture represented a simple three-dimensional (3D) analog to the two-dimensional (2D) re-entrant honeycomb model to form an interesting design target for multifunctional materials.
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Source: Phys.org