Designing composites with negative linear compressibility

Highlights: • Two approaches have been developed to design new composite structures with negative linear compressibility. • The effectiveness of the design approaches has been proved by hydrostatic compression experiments. • The designed composites process negative linear compressibility at large deformation. • The negative linear compressibility is dependent on the foam property, the reinforcement pattern, and the stiffness ratio. The phenomenon of negative linear compressibility has attracted much interest because of its unusual deformation features with many potential applications. However, the design and fabrication of materials and structures with negative linear compressibility are limited. In this paper, we proposed two approaches to designing and fabricating new composite structures with negative linear compressibility. The effectiveness of the proposed design approaches was validated experimentally by applying uniformly distributed pressure to all surfaces of bulk specimens. The deformation features, strain history, and the effective area reduction of the specimens were analyzed from the experimental data. The results clearly demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed designing and manufacturing approaches for realizing composites with negative linear compressibility.