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Published October 2019 | Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Unraveling Tensegrity Tessellations for Metamaterials with Tunable Stiffness and Bandgaps

Abstract

Tensegrity structures resemble biological tissues: A structural system that holds an internal balance of prestress. Owing to the presence of prestress, biological tissues can dramatically change their properties, making tensegrity a promising platform for tunable and functional metamaterials. However, tensegrity metamaterials require harmony between form and force in an infinitely–periodic scale, which makes the design of such systems challenging. In order to explore the full potential of tensegrity metamaterials, a systematic design approach is required. In this work, we propose an automated design framework that provides access to unlimited tensegrity metamaterial designs. The framework generates tensegrity metamaterials by tessellating blocks with designated geometries that are aware of the system periodicity. In particular, our formulation allows creation of Class-1 (i.e., floating struts) tensegrity metamaterials. We show that tensegrity metamaterials offer tunable effective elastic moduli, Poisson's ratio, and phononic bandgaps by properly changing their prestress levels, which provide a new dimension of programmability beyond geometry.

Additional Information

© 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Received 14 January 2019, Revised 11 May 2019, Accepted 12 May 2019, Available online 14 May 2019. We acknowledge support from the US NSF (National Science Foundation) through grants 1538830, and the Raymond Allen Jones Chair at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition, Ke Liu acknowledges support of the China Scholarship Council (CSC). The authors thank Dr. Raj K. Pal for helpful discussions about computational homogenization during the development of this research.

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