Tensegrity structures are assembly of bars and cables, arranged such that the bars are isolated and support compressive loads, while the cables are in tension and are path connected.
Although numerous such structures have been discovered/invented over the last half century, a systematic way to build a structure that can then tessellate over any arbitrary geometry was lacking.
We developed the first 3D tensegrity unit cell, by a judicious sequence of reflections. This unit cell overcomes the above limitation, since we can now tesselate any geometry. Along the way, they also provide unit cells for beams and plates
Such lattices offer immense possibilities for tunable wave propagation. The key idea is to exploit buckling, after buckling the bar stiffness and hence effective stiffness of unit cell changes significantly.
Journal Publications:
1. H Salahshoor, R. K. Pal and J. Rimoli. Material symmetry phase transitions in three-dimensional tensegrity metamaterials. Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, 2018.
2. R. K. Pal, M. Ruzzene and J. Rimoli. Tunable wave propagation by varying prestrain in tensegrity-based periodic media. Extreme Mechanics Letters, 2018.
3. J. Rimoli and R. K. Pal. Mechanical response of 3-dimensional tensegrity lattices. Composites Part B:Engineering, 2017.