Symplectic stiffness method for the buckling analysis of hierarchical and chiral cellular honeycomb structures

Structure-function-material integration design based on the buckling instability of flexible cellular structures has attracted much attention. According to the reversible and repeatable characteristics of buckling deformation, phonon bandgap switches, the autonomous drive of soft robots, programmable logic controllers, and reusable spacecraft landing buffer devices can be designed. Based on the Hamiltonian variational principle and symplectic eigen expansion, a theoretical analysis model of the symplectic stiffness method is established, and analytical expressions for the stiffness of several typical buckling modes of elastically supported beams are obtained. The analytical closed-form expressions for the macroscopic buckling strength of honeycombs are obtained according to the bending moment equilibrium equation. The buckling modes of regular hexagonal, hierarchical hexagonal, and tri-chiral honeycombs are obtained by numerical simulation and experimental verification, and some novel higher-order modes are observed. Uniaxial compression experiments reveal that these higher-order buckling modes can be triggered by adjusting the geometric parameters of the unit cells. The high agreement between experimental, numerical, and existing literature results for the failure surfaces of cellular structures verifies the effectiveness of the proposed symplectic stiffness method. In a word, the buckling modes can be designed to meet different functional requirements by changing the initial configuration of flexible cellular structures. This provides a new idea and theoretical guidance for the development of metamaterials and structures with tailored properties.