Thermal Expansion of Hybrid Chiral Mechanical Metamaterial with Patterned Bi-Strips

Hybrid chiral mechanical metamaterials with center squares connecting by bi-layer strips (bi-strips) with patterned interfaces are designed and fabricated via multimaterial 3D printing. Due to the thermal mismatch between the bi-strips and the chirality-induced rotation, the designs will undergo either thermal expansion or shrinkage under constant temperature increase, resulting in widely tuned overall thermal expansion coefficients (CTEs) for the chiral mechanical metamaterials. Analytical models of both the bi-strips with arbitrary dissimilar interface morphology and the chiral designs under temperature change are developed to predict the curvature of the bi-strips and the overall CTEs of the chiral designs. Two design regions with opposite trends are observed and explored. The models are verified via systematic finite element (FE) simulations and experiments on 3D-printed specimens. This investigation enlarges the design space of chiral mechanical metamaterials for achieving desired CTEs in a wide range.