Dynamics of Lightweight Tensegrity-Inspired Metamaterials Fabricated with 3D-Printing

Tensegrity structures and lattices have been of interest in engineering applications for decades, with their dynamics becoming a thriving field of study. Tensegrities consist of structural members under purely axial loading, either tension or compression, and obtain their stability from prestress. They possess unique characteristics such as high strength-to-weight ratio, nonlinear behavior, and elastic response under severe deformation. Tensegrity lattices (or metamaterials) have been shown to exhibit appealing dynamic attributes such as continuous tunability with prestress, impact mitigation, energy trapping and lensing, and nonlinear wave propagation, to name a few. However, their pin-jointed and prestressed nature presents significant manufacturing limitations, especially in the formation of lattices with large numbers of tessellated unit cells. Therefore, experimental validation of the dynamics of tensegrity metamaterials has remained elusive. For lattices with tensegrity-like characteristics to be manifested for real-world applications, a method for producing tensegrity-like metamaterials at multiple length scales is needed. In this thesis, we present a design for a 3D-printable tensegrity-inspired structure with the equivalent strain energy capacity and stress-strain response as a pin-jointed tensegrity. Using this structure as a building block for multidimensional lattices, we subject them to a range of dynamic loading conditions to study their response. First, we perform experiments and simulations to obtain the dispersion relations for 1D and 3D lattices. We demonstrate the lattices’ ability to continuously tune the dispersion characteristics (e.g., band gap and wave speed) under precompression. This trait shows potential for acoustic lensing and dispersive wave propagation. In 3D, we show that the lattice shows the same type of unique properties, such as faster shear speed than longitudinal speed, as pin-jointed tensegrity lattices. Next, we study the lattices under impact loading. Long-duration impact experiments on baseline unit cells and 1D lattices show their resilience to repeated deformation, elasticity, and load limitation behaviors. Short-duration impulse experiments and simulations exhibit a wealth of desirable properties, such as high force transmission reduction, highly dispersive wave propagation, tunable wave speeds, energy trapping, and redirection of energy. We demonstrate that these tensegrity-inspired metamaterials not only exhibit and experimentally demonstrate tensegrity-like characteristics, but open a new range of lightweight metamaterials with unprecedented dynamic properties.