The effect of a negative Poisson’s ratio on thermal stresses in cellular metallic structures

To investigate the influence of auxetic behavior on thermally induced stresses, finite element analysis simulations of the displacement and stress fields in locally heated three dimensional auxetic and cubic structures are compared. The simulations were carried out in Comsol for a cubic as well as a chiral array of 30 mm length in each spatial dimension (3 × 3 × 3 unit cells). The center cells of these arrays were heated for 20 s. For two boundary conditions (free and clamped), deformation mechanisms are analyzed. It is found, that the auxetic behavior can effectively reduce thermal stresses by internal node rotation and strut bending, especially for constrained (clamped) boundary conditions. A stress reduction of a factor of 3.3 in comparisons to a simple cubic cell array could be evaluated.