Mechanical performance of 3D-printing annular honeycomb with tailorable Poisson’s ratio

This paper reports a new annular honeycomb that shows tunable Poisson’s ratio. The presented honeycombs can provide both the in-plane negative Poisson’s ratio (NPR) and in-plane zero Poisson’s ratio (ZPR) while the shapes of the honeycomb core change. The developed honeycomb core is constructed by an annulus with four ligaments distributed bi-axial symmetrically, which shows great diversity of mechanical properties. The developed theoretical models of the in-plane elasticity are based on Castigliano’s Second Theorem and energy principle. Two parameters were used to describe the deformation mechanisms of the unit cell concisely. The effect of two parameters on the Poisson’s ratio and Young’s modulus was investigated. The Young’s modulus derived from the Finite Element (FE) analysis all have an good agreement with that derived from theoretical results, and the experiments were carried out to confirm the validity of them convincingly.