Buckling of metamaterial-based cylindrical shells under axial compression

The recent advancement in on-orbit servicing, assembly, manufacturing (OSAM) has kindled a new interest in space-frame structures that can potentially serve as large-scale in-space infrastructure. Space-frame-like shells or gridshells are lightweight and constructed with repetitive unit cells arranged in a periodic order. This unique design approach of arranging unit cells in a periodic manner is applied to the conventional cylindrical shell in this research paper. In this paper, we analyze the buckling of metamaterial-based cylindrical shells (meta-shells) under axial compression. Metamaterials are engineered architected materials with tunable properties such as negative stiffness, negative Poisson’s ratio, and multi-stability. In this research, House Unit Cell (HUC) variants and some commonly used topologies for metamaterials are selected to create cylindrical shells. Unlike a conventional cylindrical shell, HUC variants based cylindrical meta-shell avoids the abrupt destabilization after the first bifurcation point. Additionally, the scalability and effects of defects on metamaterial based cylindrical shells are presented in this paper. The structural efficiency with mass parameter and loading index is also discussed to compare different cylindrical meta-shells.