Transverse loading of cellular topologically interlocked materials

Abstract

a b s t r a c tTopologically interlocked materials (TIMs) are a class of materials made by a structured assembly of an array of identically shaped and sized unit elements that are held in a confining framework. The assembly can resist transverse forces in the absence of adhesives between the unit elements. The present study focuses on topologically interlocked materials with cellular unit elements. The resulting materials achieve their properties by a combination of deformation of the individual unit elements and their contact interaction. Drop tower tests were conducted to characterize the mechanical behavior of the cellular TIMs made of an intrinsically brittle base material. The TIMs were found to exhibit perfect softening, independent of the relative density of the cellular units. The analysis of the experiments revealed a positive correlation between strength and toughness in contrast to more conventional materials. An analytical model for the prediction of the observed material behavior is developed. Model predictions are in agreement with experimental data. The implications of the present findings for the design of these novel materials are discussed.

Adaptive mechanical properties of topologically interlocking material systems

“…The response of a TIM under fixed constraint conditions, data from [38], demonstrates a characteristic parabolic response with the TIM exhibiting a gradual decay in load carrying capacity until final collapse. [38] gives the envelope of available F − δ space.…”

“…Recognizing the static indeterminacy of the problem at hand, a framework for the predictions of the mechanical properties of TIM assemblies was developed in [38].…”

“…This can be thought of as being a computation is two half-steps, Figure 3, such that at (i+1/2) the truss end points were displaced by Δu B and subsequently kept fixed at (i+1). At increment (i+1) one thus obtains [38] where all experiments considered a fixed constraint with zero in-plane preload.…”

Mechanics of Multiscale Energy Dissipation in Topologically Interlocked Materials-11.1 STIR

“…Khandelwal et al [15] experimentally examined the quasi-static responses of TIMs asembled with regular tetrahedra, and proposed an analytic model to predicted the quasi-static beaviors of TIM with thrust line theory. Mather et al [16] studied the remanufacturability of TIMs, illustrated that only small portion of units could not be reused after failure of the TIMs.…”

“…TIMs consists of dense packing of tetrahedral unit elements made of Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) material, which were fabricated using fused deposition modeling (FDM) additive manufacturing (AM) motivate the material system under investigation [15]. Limited exploratory research has been done in understanding the mechanical characteristics of these novel structures, more specifically TIMs subject to low velocity impact.…”