Design, Simulation and Experimental Investigation of 3D Printed Mechanical Metamaterials

Mechanical metamaterials have generated special interest recently due to their tailorable structure, exceptional mechanical properties, and advancements in 3D printing processes that allow the fabrication of intricately structured components. Designing innovative structures of metamaterials will lead to the development of advanced materials with special properties. The experimental investigation presented in this paper involves the design, simulation, fabrication, and testing of three different mechanical metamaterial models i.e. Chiral, Re-entrant, and Hybrid printed in acrylonitrile styrene acrylate (ASA) using fused deposition modeling (FDM). Subsequently, a uniaxial compression test and ex-situ characterization was performed for studying the mechanical properties, the types of fracture and crack propagation of the printed metamaterial models which may lead to the development of metamaterials with tunable compressive/bending stiffness.