A Newton solver for micromorphic computational homogenization enabling multiscale buckling analysis of pattern-transforming metamaterials

摘要

Mechanical metamaterials feature engineered microstructures designed to exhibit exotic, and often counter-intuitive, effective behaviour such as negative Poisson's ratio or negative compressibility. Such a specific response is often achieved through instability-induced transformations of the underlying periodic microstructure into one or multiple patterning modes. Due to a strong kinematic coupling of individual repeating microstructural cells, non-local behaviour and size effects emerge, which cannot easily be captured by classical homogenization schemes. In addition, the individual patterning modes can mutually interact in space as well as in time, while at the engineering scale the entire structure can buckle globally. For efficient numerical predictions of macroscale engineering applications, a micromorphic computational homogenization scheme has recently been developed (Roko et al., J. Mech. Phys. Solids 123, 119-137, 2019). Although this framework is in principle capable of accounting for spatial and temporal interactions between individual patterning modes, its implementation relied on a gradient -based quasi-Newton solution technique. This solver is suboptimal because (i) it has sub-quadratic convergence, and (ii) the absence of Hessians does not allow for proper bifurcation analyses. Given that mechanical metamaterials often rely on controlled instabilities, these limitations are serious. Addressing them will reduce the dependency of the solution on the initial guess by perturbing the system towards the correct deformation when a bifurcation point is encountered. Eventually, this enables more accurate and reliable modelling and design of metamaterials. To achieve this goal, a full Newton method, entailing all derivations and definitions of the tangent operators, is provided in detail in this paper. The construction of the macroscopic tangent operator is not straightforward due to specific model assumptions on the decomposition of the underlying displacement field pertinent to the micromorphic framework, involving orthogonality constraints. Analytical expressions for the first and second variation of the total potential energy are given, and the complete algorithm is listed. The developed methodology is demonstrated with two examples in which a competition between local and global buckling exists and where multiple patterning modes emerge. The numerical results indicate that local to global buckling transition can be predicted within a relative error of 6% in terms of the applied strains. The expected pattern combinations are triggered even for the case of multiple patterns. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).