A novel re-entrant auxetic honeycomb with enhanced in-plane impact resistance

Recently, auxetic honeycombs have attracted considerable attention for their excellent mechanical properties, especially the potential applications for energy absorption. In this paper, a novel re-entrant auxetic honeycomb is proposed and named as re-entrant star-shaped honeycomb (RSH), with the in-plane impact responses explored theoretically and numerically. Three types of microstructural deformation modes are observed under different impact velocities, including low-velocity mode, medium-velocity mode and high-velocity mode. Moreover, a deformation map is summarized to illustrate the effects of the impact velocity and the relative density on the deformation modes. Two typical plateau stress regions are detected under low-velocity impact loading, and the second plateau stress is almost twice higher than the first one. The transverse contraction of the RSH mainly occurs at the first plateau region, which is different for the classical re-entrant honeycomb (RH). In addition, the absorbed energy of the RSH decreases slightly and then increases with the impact velocity. The results of the finite element simulations suggest that the RSH shows more excellent impact resistance, compared with the RH and SSH with same cell wall thickness. Furthermore, the effects of the cell wall thickness and the impact velocity on the crushing strength of the RSH are discussed, and the theoretical results are in good agreement with the finite element simulations.