A New Chiral Beam Element for Modelling Chiral Honeycombs

Abstract

Chiral honeycombs which exhibit auxetic behaviors (negative Poisson’s ratios) have attracted much research interest due to their novel mechanical properties. They are broadly used in designing new functional structures, such as energy absorption and noise mitigation materials. To analyze the behaviors of these materials, finite element models are generally adopted, which may require much time and labor to construct and implement. To simplify the numerical modelling, a novel Chiral Beam Element for finite element simulation is proposed in this paper. Both static and dynamic analyses are conducted and the numerical expense, i.e., the modelling procedures and the computational time, is reduced significantly when compared to traditional finite element models.