Novel Chiral Structure With Tailored Mechanical Response Exploiting Elastic Instabilities

This paper presents a structural concept that exploits elastic instabilities in novel periodic lattice structures for shape adaptation purposes. The nonlinear behaviour resulting from the occurrence of local buckling is utilised to achieve significant variations in the global structural response of the lattice. For the proposed structural concept, a unit cell is identified and utilised to investigate the mechanical characteristics for the load cases of uniaxial compression, shear, and rotation, conducting nonlinear finite element simulations. The results of the unit cell characterization are compared to the mechanical response of lattice structures under equivalent loading and convergence is achieved for all considered load cases. This paper therefore introduces a novel design concept to achieve selective compliance, especially beneficial for shape adaptation of wing structures.