The Durability of a Chiral Auxetic Structure

Metamaterials are bulk objects with special mechanism properties defined by their repetitive inner structures, rather than the materials they are made of. One of the special mechanisms is ``auxetic behavior'': when the materials are stretched in one direction, unlike conventional materials, they will also expand in the lateral direction. In this project we studied the dependence of Poisson's Ratio on the geometric parameters of a chiral auxetic structure. This chiral auxetic structure can be potentially applied in deployable antennas. We used 3-D printer to efficiently design and produce the chiral auxetic structures. With an innovative experimental setup and image analysis techniques, we were able to study the durability of the chiral auxetic structures with various geometric parameters.