Topological Interlocking in Design of Structures and Materials
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1188-LL05-06
Topological Interlocking in Design of Structures and Materials Yuri Estrin1,2, Arcady Dyskin3, Elena Pasternak4 and Stephan Schaare5 1
ARC Centre of Excellence for Design in Light Metals, Department of Materials Engineering, Monash
University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia 2
CSIRO Division of Materials Science and Engineering, Clayton, Vic. 3168, Australia
3
School of Civil and Resource Engineering, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling
Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia 4
School of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway,
Crawley WA 6009, Australia 5
Rheinmetall Landsysteme GmbH, Kassel, Germany
ABSTRACT Since its introduction in 2001 [1], the concept of topological interlocking has advanced to reasonable maturity, and various research groups have now adopted it as a promising avenue for developing novel structures and materials with unusual mechanical properties. In this paper, we review the known geometries of building blocks and their arrangements that permit topological interlocking. Their properties relating to stiffness, fracture resistance and damping are discussed on the basis of experimental evidence and modeling results. An outlook to prospective engineering applications is also given. INTRODUCTION In a quest for hybrid materials and structures providing multifunctionality along with favorable mechanical properties, materials researchers are increasingly turning their attention to geometry inspired designs [2]. One of the promising design principles is that of topological interlocking [1,3,4]. The rationale behind this principle is as follows. For brittle materials, there are obvious benefits of using fragmented, rather than monolithic structures. Indeed, due to the size effect, as represented, e.g. by the Weibull statistics [5], the failure probability of a structure is much higher than that of its constituent elements. Should it become possible to break a massive body down to small building blocks and then re-construct it from the fragments, a structure with a much higher resistance to failure would be obtained – provided, of course, that the building blocks can be held together in an efficient way to provide structural integrity of the re-constructed body. In our earlier work [1,3-7] we claimed that this can be rendered possible through the use of specific geometrical shapes and arrangements of the blocks, which ensure their geometric, or topological interlocking. According to this concept, an individual element is held in place by its neighbors kinematically, rather than through connectors or binder. Imagine a wall from which a brick cannot be removed not because it is attached to its neighbors by mortar,
but just because its shape and the shapes of the neighbors precludes that. This is the principle that has been implicitly used in construction of dry stone walls in medieval Europe [8], fortified structures of Japanese castles [9], Incan masonry [10], etc. So the principle is not new, and its viability has been tested over
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