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Abstract Architectured composites with sutural tessellations across all length scales are found in the armor systems of many fauna and flora species in nature. These composites are typically composed of relatively stiff building blocks articulated via compliant wavy suture seam, showing a remarkable jigsaw-puzzle-like sutural tessellation. Inspired by these interesting natural architecture materials, bio-inspired designs of composite plates with hexagonal, diamond and rectangular building blocks and triangular suture tessellations were developed. Generalized closed-form analytical expressions for the effective stiffnesses along major axes of symmetry of these designs were derived and finite element (FE) simulations were performed to verify the analytical solution. Suture tessellation was shown to be essential in determining the mechanical properties of the composite plates. The influences of suture waviness, suture dominancy, the shape of the building blocks and the stiffness ratio of the suture tessellation were evaluated. The results provide design guidelines for widely tuning the mechanical properties of the biomimetic composite plates via tailoring suture tessellation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A methodology was developed to use a hyperelastic softening model to predict the constitutive behavior and the spatial damage propagation of nonlinear materials with damage-induced softening under mixed-mode loading. A user subroutine (ABAQUS/VUMAT) was developed for numerical implementation of the model. 3D-printed wavy soft rubbery interfacial layer was used as a material system to verify and validate the methodology. The Arruda − Boyce hyperelastic model is incorporated with the softening model to capture the nonlinear pre-and post- damage behavior of the interfacial layer under mixed Mode I/II loads. To characterize model parameters of the 3D-printed rubbery interfacial layer, a series of scarf-joint specimens were designed, which enabled systematic variation of stress triaxiality via a single geometric parameter, the slant angle. It was found that the important model parameter m is exponentially related to the stress triaxiality. Compact tension specimens of the sinusoidal wavy interfacial layer with different waviness were designed and fabricated via multi-material 3D printing. Finite element (FE) simulations were conducted to predict the spatial damage propagation of the material within the wavy interfacial layer. Compact tension experiments were performed to verify the model prediction. The results show that the model developed is able to accurately predict the damage propagation of the 3D-printed rubbery interfacial layer under complicated stress-state without pre-defined failure criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geometrically structured interfaces in nature possess enhanced, and often surprising, mechanical properties, and provide inspiration for materials design. This paper investigates the mechanics of deformation and failure mechanisms of suture interface designs through analytical models and experiments on 3D printed polymer physical prototypes. Suture waveforms with generalized trapezoidal geometries (trapezoidal, rectangular, anti-trapezoidal, and triangular) are studied and characterized by several important geometric parameters: the presence or absence of a bonded tip region, the tip angle, and the geometry. It is shown that a wide range (in some cases as great as an order of magnitude) in stiffness, strength, and toughness is achievable dependent on tip bonding, tip angle, and geometry. Suture interfaces with a bonded tip region exhibit a higher initial stiffness due to the greater load bearing by the skeletal teeth, a double peak in the stress–strain curve corresponding to the failure of the bonded tip and the failure of the slanted interface region or tooth, respectively, and an additional failure and toughening mechanism due to the failure of the bonded tip. Anti-trapezoidal geometries promote the greatest amplification of properties for suture interfaces with a bonded tip due the large tip interface area. The tip angle and geometry govern the stress distributions in the teeth and the ratio of normal to shear stresses in the interfacial layers, which together determine the failure mechanism of the interface and/or the teeth. Rectangular suture interfaces fail by simple shearing of the interfaces. Trapezoidal and triangular suture interfaces fail by a combination of shear and tensile normal stresses in the interface, leading to plastic deformation, cavitation events, and subsequent stretching of interface ligaments with mostly elastic deformation in the teeth. Anti-trapezoidal suture interfaces with small tip angles have high stress concentrations in the teeth and fail catastrophically by tooth failure, whereas larger tip angles exhibit a shear failure of the interfaces. Therefore, larger tip angles and trapezoidal or triangular geometries promote graceful failure, and smaller tip angles and anti-trapezoidal geometries promote more brittle-like failure. This dependence is reminiscent of biological systems, which exhibit a range of failure behaviors with limited materials and varied geometry. Triangular geometries uniquely exhibit uniform stress distributions in its teeth and promote the greatest amplification of mechanical properties. In both the bonded and unbonded cases, the predictions from the presented analytical models and experimental results on 3D printed prototypes show excellent agreement. This validates the analytical models and allows for the models to be used as a tool for the design of new materials and interfaces with tailored mechanical behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Suture interfaces with a triangular wave form commonly found in nature have recently been shown to exhibit exceptional mechanical behavior, where geometric parameters such as amplitude, frequency, and hierarchy can be used to nonlinearly tailor and amplify mechanical properties. In this study, using the principle of complementary virtual work, we formulate a generalized, composite mechanical model for arbitrarily-shaped interdigitating suture interfaces in order to more broadly investigate the influence of wave-form geometry on load transmission, deformation mechanisms, anisotropy, and stiffness, strength, and toughness of the suture interface for tensile and shear loading conditions. The application of this suture interface model is exemplified for the case of the general trapezoidal wave-form. Expressions for the in-plane stiffness, strength and fracture toughness and failure mechanisms are derived as nonlinear functions of shape factor β (which characterizes the general trapezoidal shape as triangular, trapezoidal, rectangular or anti-trapezoidal), the wavelength/amplitude ratio, the interface width/wavelength ratio, and the stiffness and strength ratios of the skeletal/interfacial phases. These results provide guidelines for choosing and tailoring interface geometry to optimize the mechanical performance in resisting different loads. The presented model provides insights into the relation between the mechanical function and the morphological diversity of suture interface geometries observed in natural systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A closed form Hierarchical Multi-interphase Model (HMM) based on the classical elasticity theory is proposed to study the influence of the interphase around inclusions on the enhancement mechanism of composites in the elastic regime. The HMM is verified by three-dimensional Finite Element simulations and highly consistent results are obtained for the cases with relatively low stiffness ratios (SR) between the inclusions and the matrix (SR<100). For cases with large SRs (up to 10,000), the HMM with the assumption of ellipsoidal inclusions provides a lower bound for the stiffnesses of composites enhanced by non-ellipsoidal particles with the same aspect ratio of inclusions. The Modified Hierarchical Multi-interphase Model (MHMM) is developed by introducing morphology parameters to the HMM, to capture the high morphology sensitivity of composites at high SRs with the non-uniform stress–strain fields. In addition, one important feature of the HMM and the MHMM is the particle-size dependency. As an application of this model to predict size effects and shape effects, the enhancement efficiencies of three typical inclusions – sphere, fiber-like particle and platelet – at different scales, are studied and compared, producing useful information about the morphology optimization at the nano-scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A composite model for suture joints with a connective layer of aligned fibers embedded in soft matrix is proposed. Based on the principle of complementary virtual work, composite cylinder assemblage (CCA) approach and generalized self-consistent micro-mechanical models, a hierarchical homogenization methodology is developed to systematically quantify the synergistic effects of suture morphology and fiber orientation on the overall mechanical properties of sutures. Suture joints with regular triangular wave-form serve as an example material system to apply this methodology. Both theoretical and finite element mechanical models are developed and compared to evaluate the overall normal stiffness of sutures as a function of wavy morphology of sutures, fiber orientation, fiber volume fraction, and the mechanical properties of fibers and matrix in the interfacial layer. It is found that generally due to the anisotropy-induced coupling effects between tensile and shear deformation, the effective normal stiffness of sutures is highly dependent on the fiber orientation in the connective layer. Also, the effective shear modulus of the connective layer and the stiffness ratio between the fiber and matrix significantly influence the effects of fiber orientation. In addition, optimal fiber orientations are found to maximize the stiffness of suture joints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]