Tunable tensile response of honeycomb plates with nanoscale thickness: Testing and modeling

Plate mechanical metamaterials with nanoscale thickness demonstrate significantly enhanced mechanical properties compared to solid plates that lack micropatterning. We have previously reported how the honeycomb corrugation greatly increases the bending stiffness, but any functional applications also require a full understanding of the tensile properties. Here we report that, surprisingly, the tensile properties of alumina plates with nanoscale thickness can be measured using conventional materials testing tools and that the tensile stiffness of honeycomb corrugated plates is greatly reduced, providing an unusual combination of high bending stiffness and low tensile stiffness that cannot be achieved with unpatterned plates. These measurements, along with finite-element (FE) simulations, provide validation for our analytical model that fully characterizes the tensile response of the corrugated nanoplates, thus enabling predictable tuning of their mechanical properties by changing the corrugation geometry. Plates optimized for high bending stiffness and low tensile stiffness can find applications as wings of microflyers or deployable aerospace components. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.