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Imperfection sensitivity of mechanical properties in soft network materials with horseshoe microstructures

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Abstract

Developments of soft network materials with rationally distributed wavy microstructures have enabled many promising applications in bio-integrated electronic devices, due to their abilities to reproduce precisely nonlinear mechanical properties of human tissues/organs. In practical applications, the soft network materials usually serve as the encapsulation layer and/or substrate of bio-integrated electronic devices, where deterministic holes can be utilized to accommodate hard chips, thereby increasing the filling ratio of the device system. Therefore, it is essential to understand how the hole-type imperfection affects the stretchability of soft network materials with various geometric constructions. This work presents a systematic investigation of the imperfection sensitivity of mechanical properties in soft network materials consisting of horseshoe microstructures, through combined computational and experimental studies. A factor of imperfection insensitivity of stretchability is introduced to quantify the influence of hole imperfections, as compared to the case of perfect soft network materials. Such factor is shown to have different dependences on the arc angle and normalized width of horseshoe microstructures for triangular network materials. The soft triangular and Kagome network materials, especially with the arc angle in the range of (30\(^{\circ }\), 60\(^{\circ }\)), are found to be much more imperfection insensitive than corresponding traditional lattice materials with straight microstructures. Differently, the soft honeycomb network materials are not as imperfection insensitive as traditional honeycomb lattice materials.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by a grant from the Institute for Guo Qiang, Tsinghua University (Grant No. 2019GQG1012). Y.Z. acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11722217 and 11921002), the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (#2019Z08QCX10) and the Henry Fok Education Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. AML, Department of Engineering Mechanics; Center for Flexible Electronics Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Jianxing Liu, Xinyuan Zhu, Zhangming Shen & Yihui Zhang

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  1. Jianxing Liu
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  2. Xinyuan Zhu
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  4. Yihui Zhang
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Correspondence to Yihui Zhang.

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Executive Editor: Xi-Qiao Feng.

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Liu, J., Zhu, X., Shen, Z. et al. Imperfection sensitivity of mechanical properties in soft network materials with horseshoe microstructures. Acta Mech. Sin. 37, 1050–1062 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-021-01087-x

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