Large deformations of planar extensible beams and pantographic lattices. Heuristic homogenization, experimental and numerical examples of equilibrium

The aim of this paper is to find a computationally efficient and predictive model for the class of systems that we call ‘pantographic structures’. The interest in these materials was increased by the possibilities opened by the diffusion of technology of three-dimensional printing. They can be regarded, once choosing a suitable length scale, as families of beams (also called fibres) interconnected to each other by pivots and undergoing large displacements and large deformations. There are, however, relatively few ‘ready-to-use’ results in the literature of nonlinear beam theory. In this paper, we consider a discrete spring model for extensible beams and propose a heuristic homogenization technique of the kind first used by Piola to formulate a continuum fully nonlinear beam model. The homogenized energy which we obtain has some peculiar and interesting features which we start to describe by solving numerically some exemplary deformation problems. Furthermore, we consider pantographic structures, find the corresponding homogenized second gradient deformation energies and study some planar problems. Numerical solutions for these two-dimensional problems are obtained via minimization of energy and are compared with some experimental measurements, in which elongation phenomena cannot be neglected.