Investigation of the equivalent material properties and failure stress of the re-entrant composite lattice structures using an analytical model

In the present study, a novel theoretical model is developed, based on classical laminate theory, to predict the equivalent mechanical properties of the re-entrant lattice structures, which composed of continuous fiber reinforced composite struts. Three main mechanism of stretching, flexing and hinging are considered and a general closed-form formulation is derived to estimate the auxetic honeycomb's elastic and shear modulus as well as Poisson's ratios. In spite of previous studies in which the response of honeycomb structures is modeled using beam theory, here, each strut of unit cell is expressed as a composite laminate with orthotropic mechanical properties and classical laminate theory is implemented to calculate the mechanical constants. In addition, using the available relations, the elastic buckling stress and failure load of the auxetic unit cell is evaluated. The proposed model is validated using experimental results, which are available from the previous studies as well as FE simulations. A parametric study is also conducted on the model to study the effects of cell angle and honeycomb's density on the mechanical properties and failure stresses of the re-entrant structure. The results show that, the proposed analytical model can finely predict the equivalent and failure properties of the auxetic honeycomb structures. Furthermore, it is observed that, for the considered re-entrant composite structures with the cell angles between −25 to 25, the vertical strut fails due to the damage evolution and for the unit cells with other cell angles, the buckling failure is determinative.