Mechanical behavior of biomimetic surface scales

Examining the evolutionary response of diverse biological species to counter the existential threats from hostile environmental and predatory landscape can shed light on the principles of protective system design. In this context, dermal scales, prevalent across biological groups imply their versatility in boosting survivability and providing multifunctional advantages for the species. Here, we investigate the nonlinear mechanical effects of biomimetic scale-like attachments on the behavior of an elastic substrate brought about by the contact interaction of scales in pure bending using qualitative experiments, analytical models, and detailed finite element analysis. Our results reveal the existence of three distinct kinematic phases of operation spanning linear, nonlinear, and rigid behavior driven by kinematic interactions of scales. The response of the modified elastic beam strongly depends on the size and spatial distribution of rigid scales. The nonlinearity is perceptible even in relatively small strain regime and without invoking the well-known material level complexities. Our study shows biomimetic sclaes are capable of exhibiting an additional higher spatial scale of complex mechanical effects in addition to those at the lower meso level often due to the topology of constituents and the even lower constituent level which are often of purely material origin

Frictional Effects in Biomimetic Scales Engagement

Scales engagement can contribute significantly to nonlinear bending behavior of elastic substrates with rigid biomimetic scales. In this letter, we investigate the role of friction in modulating the nonlinearity that arises due to self-contact of scales through an analytical investigation. We model the friction as dry Coulomb type friction between rigid links and the substrate is taken to be linear elastic. Our results reveal that frictional effects give rise to two possible locking mechanisms, namely static friction lock and kinetic friction lock. These locks arise due to a combination of interfacial behavior and geometry. In addition to these extremes, the frictional behavior is found to increase stiffness of the structure. This dual nature of friction which influences both system operation and its terminal limit results in the maximum relative frictional work to lie at intermediate friction coefficients and not at the extremes of frictional limits.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Material-Geometry Interplay in Damping of Biomimetic Scale Beams

Biomimetic scale-covered substrates are architected meta-structures exhibiting fascinating emergent nonlinearities via the geometry of collective scales contacts. In spite of much progress in understanding their elastic nonlinearity, their dissipative behavior arising from scales sliding is relatively uninvestigated in the dynamic regime. Recently discovered is the phenomena of viscous emergence, where dry Coulomb friction between scales can lead to apparent viscous damping behavior of the overall multi-material substrate. In contrast to this structural dissipation, material dissipation common in many polymers has never been considered, especially synergestically with geometrical factors. This is addressed here for the first time, where material visco-elasticity is introduced via a simple Kelvin-Voigt model for brevity and clarity. The results contrast the two damping sources in these architectured systems: material viscoelasticity, and geometrical frictional scales contact. It is discovered that although topically similar in effective damping, viscoelsatic damping follows a different damping envelope than dry friction, including starkly different effects on damping symmetry and specific damping capacity.Comment: 5 figures, 7 page

Slender Origami with Complex 3D Folding Shapes

One-dimensional slender bodies can be deformed or shaped into spatially complex curves relatively easily due to their inherent compliance. However, traditional methods of fabricating complex spatial shapes are cumbersome, prone to error accumulation and not amenable to elegant programmability. In this letter, we introduce a one-dimensional origami based on attaching Miura-ori that can fold into various programmed two or three-dimensional shapes. We study the out-of-plane displacement characteristics of this origami and demonstrate with examples, design of slender bodies that conform to programmed complex spatial curves. Our study provides a new, accurate, and single actuation solution of shape programmability

SpiderWeb honeycombs

A new class of hierarchical fractal-like honeycombs inspired by the topology of the “spiderweb” were introduced and their small and large deformations were investigated analytically, numerically, and experimentally. Small deformation elasticity results show that the isotropic in-plane elastic moduli (Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio) of the structures can be controlled over several orders of magnitude by tuning dimension ratios in the hierarchical pattern of spiderweb, and the response can vary from bending to stretching dominated. In large deformations, spiderweb hierarchy postpones the onset of instability compared to stretching dominated triangular honeycomb (which is indeed a special case of the proposed spiderweb honeycomb) and exhibits hardening behavior due to geometrical nonlinearity. Furthermore, simple geometrical arguments were obtained for large deformation effective Poisson’s ratio of first-order spiderweb honeycombs, which show good agreement with numerical and experimental results. Spiderweb honeycombs exhibit auxetic behavior depending on the nondimensional geometrical ratio of spiderweb