Tailoring plastic deformation of metallic architected materials toward multi-stage energy dissipations

Architected materials composed of instability-based unit cells have been exploited in energy dissipation/ absorption applications. One stability-based unit cell type that comprises slender beams can experience geometrical nonlinearities under small forces. Although reusability provided by these materials is attrac-tive to engineering applications, the intrinsic drawback of this mechanism is the low load-carry capacity. Here, we attempt to increase the capacity of instability-based architected materials by inducing material nonlinearity of metallic materials. Through experimental tests and numerical simulations, this work investigates the plastic deformation of metallic architected materials using curved beams (MAM-CB) and their resulting energy dissipation capacity. We first investigated the mechanical properties of various MAM-CB unit cells, and finally studied the tradeoff between energy dissipation and fatigue life by embed-ding a geometrical gradient. In addition, we presented a method to enhance the energy dissipation capac-ity of a conventional structure by adapting MAM-CB units to form a new hybrid structural device. Furthermore, this method is showcased by using MAM-CB units under a possible scenario in seismic engineering, aimed to develop novel damping components with enhanced and customizable energy -dissipating properties. Our study paves the way for applying architected materials as augmented struc-tures to strengthen the performance of the existing structures.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).