Designing and compression behaviors of ductile hierarchical pyramidal lattice composites

•A new hierarchical pyramidal lattice truss composites was designed and manufactured.•Strengths and complete stress strain curves of the hierarchical composites were revealed.•The hierarchical lattice was designed to be controlled by stable progressive crushing.•The hierarchical lattice composite has excellent ductility and specific energy absorption.

To improve the ductility of lightweight cellular material, hierarchical pyramidal lattice truss composites were designed and manufactured. Rib of the hierarchical pyramidal lattice truss composite is made of glass fiber reinforced woven textile sandwich structure and designed weft-loaded. Flat-wise compression experiments were carried out to explore the strength and deformation mode of the hierarchical pyramidal lattice truss composite. Progressive crushing of the sandwich rib enables the hierarchical lattice composite to have a long stable deformation plateau. Stress of the deformation plateau of the hierarchical lattice composite is rather close to its strength, indicating that the hierarchical lattice composite would have excellent specific energy absorption, even better than aluminum lattice structures. The experiments reveal that the hierarchical structure makes the fiber reinforced lattice composite much more ductile and weight efficient in energy absorption.