Pentamodes (first conceived theoretically by Milton and Cherkaev) are a very interesting class of mechanical metamaterials that can be used as building blocks of structures withdecoupled bulk and shear moduli. The pentamodes usually are composed of double cone-shaped struts with the middle diameter being large and the end diameters being tiny (ideally approaching zero). The cubic diamond geometry was proposed by Milton and Cherkaev as a suitable geometry for the unit cell and has since been used in the majority of the works on pentamodes. In this work, we aim to evaluate the degree to which the base unit cell design contributes to high bulk to shear modulus ratio, also known as Figure Of Merit(FOM). In addition to the diamond unit cell, three other well-known unit cell types are considered, and the effect of small diameter size and the ratio of large-to-small diameter, α, on the FOM is evaluated. The results showed that regardless of the base unit cell shape, the FOM value is highly dependent on the d (the smaller diameter size of double-cone) value, while its dependence on the D (the greater diameter of double-cone) value is very weak. For d/h∝0.05 (h representing the linkage length), figures of merit in the range of 10³ could be reached for all the studied topologies.

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Pentamode metamaterials are a type of extremal designer metamaterials, which are able to demonstrate extremely high rigidity in one direction and extremely high compliance in other directions. Pentamodes can, therefore, be considered as building blocks of exotic materials with any arbitrarily selected thermodynamically admissible elasticity tensor. The pentamode lattices can then be envisioned to be combined to construct intermediate extremal materials, such as quadramodes, trimodes, and bimodes. In this study, we constructed several primary types of anisotropic pentamode lattices (with midpoint positioning of 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 30%, 35%, and 42% of the main unit cell diagonal) and then combined them mutually to explore the dependence of elastic properties of hybrid pentamodes on those of individual constructing lattices. Several anisotropic individual and hybrid pentamode lattice structures were produced using the MultiJet Additive Manufacturing technique and then mechanically tested under compression. Finite element models were also created using the COMSOL Multiphysics package. Two-component hybrid pentamode lattices composed of individual lattices with extensively different (as large as two orders of magnitudes) B / G ratios were constructed and analyzed. It was demonstrated that it is possible to design and construct composite intermediate extremal materials with arbitrary eigenvalues in the elastic tensor. It is concluded that the elastic E, shear G, and bulk moduli B of the hybrid structure are the superpositions of the corresponding moduli of the individual lattice structures. Poisson's ratio ν of the hybrid pentamode structure equals that of individual structure with higher Poisson's ratio. The yield stress σ y of the hybrid pentamode lattice structure depends on the elastic moduli of the constructing lattice structures, as well as the yield stress of the weaker lattice structure.

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The aim of this study was to investigate the applicability of acoustic emission (AE) technique to evaluate delamination crack in glass/epoxy composite laminates under quasi-static and fatigue loading. To this aim, double cantilever beam specimens were subjected to mode I quasi-static and fatigue loading conditions and the generated AE signals were recorded during the tests. By analyzing the mechanical and AE results, an analytical correlation between the AE energy with the released strain energy and the crack growth was established. It was found that there is a 3rd degree polynomial correlation between the crack growth and the cumulative AE energy. Using this correlation the delamination crack growth was predicted under both the static and fatigue loading conditions. The predicted crack growth values was were in a good agreement with the visually recorded data during the tests. The results indicated that the proposed AE-based method has good applicability to evaluate the delamination crack growth under quasi-static and fatigue loading conditions, especially when the crack is embedded within the structure and could not be seen visually.@en