Tunable shear stiffness in a metamaterial sheet

In this paper a metamaterial sheet constituted by a periodic pattern of square tensegrity cells (T-bar) subjected to a uniform equibiaxial pressure is studied. In particular, a minimal mass lattice is analytical determined by imposing stability and material failure conditions. Interestingly, the shear stiffness of this optimized lattice is very small in comparison to the other moduli and exhibits a linear dependence on the applied load. This behavior suggests the interesting possibility of tailoring new materials with force tunable shear modulus.