A wire-woven cellular metal of ultrahigh strength

Recently, the wire-woven bulk Kagome (WBK) has been introduced for fabricating a multilayered truss-type cellular metal. In this study, in order to develop ultrahigh-strength cellular metals, two types of WBK specimens were fabricated from spring steel wires and their strengths were examined under compression. In Type I, although the brass filled in the cross points increased the density by 18%, the measured strengths were substantially lower than the values estimated by analytic solutions based on the mechanics of the ideal Kagome structure. On the other hand, in Type II, the brass filled in the tetrahedron cells resulted in an additional increase in density of 10%, but the measured strengths increased drastically. Type II was found to fail by a new mechanism - shear at the cross points of the wires. The compressive strength of Type II reached 38 MPa at a density of 0.45 g cc−1, which (to the author's knowledge) is the highest value reported to date.