A novel two-dimensional mechanical metamaterial with negative Poisson's ratio

Artificial auxetic materials with negative Poisson's ratio enable distinctive elastic response in the direction orthogonal to the loaded direction, i.e. shrinking when compressed and expanding when stretched, compared to conventional materials. Such distinctive mechanical characteristic makes auxetic materials unique in practice. Current studies in this aspect focus mainly on the realization of beam-dominated microstructures such as re-entrant and chiral lattices and of cellular microstructures with orthogonal elliptical hole pattern. In this study, a novel two-dimensional auxetic microstructure is designed by introducing peanut-shaped holes in solid bulk matrix. Compared to the microstructure with elliptical hole pattern, the present design can produce slightly larger negative Poisson's ratio and achieve significantly lower stress level. The samples consisting of a number of centimeter-scale unit cells with the peanut-shaped holes are fabricated efficiently via additive manufacturing technique. Experiment and finite element simulation of tensile test are carried out on the specific sample to demonstrate the auxetic effect of the present design and simultaneously verify the computational model. Finally, effects of some parameters on Poisson's ratio, which may control the auxetic behavior of the present microstructure, are discussed for better understanding deformation mechanism of the proposed auxetic material.