Mechanical metamaterials are man-made rationally-designed structures that present un-precedented mechanical properties not found in nature. One of the most well-known mechanical metamaterials is auxetics, which demonstrates negative Poisson’s ratio (NPR) behavior that is very beneficial in several industrial applications. In this study, a specific type of auxetic metamaterial structure namely idealized 3D re-entrant structure is studied analytically, numerically, and experi-mentally. The noted structure is constructed of three types of struts—one loaded purely axially and two loaded simultaneously flexurally and axially, which are inclined and are spatially defined by angles θ and φ. Analytical relationships for elastic modulus, yield stress, and Poisson’s ratio of the 3D re-entrant unit cell are derived based on two well-known beam theories namely Euler–Bernoulli and Timoshenko. Moreover, two finite element approaches one based on beam elements and one based on volumetric elements are implemented. Furthermore, several specimens are additively manufactured (3D printed) and tested under compression. The analytical results had good agree-ment with the experimental results on the one hand and the volumetric finite element model results on the other hand. Moreover, the effect of various geometrical parameters on the mechanical properties of the structure was studied, and the results demonstrated that angle θ (related to tension-dominated struts) has the highest influence on the sign of Poisson’s ratio and its extent, while angle φ (related to compression-dominated struts) has the lowest influence on the Poisson’s ratio. Never-theless, the compression-dominated struts (defined by angle φ) provide strength and stiffness for the structure. The results also demonstrated that the structure could have zero Poisson’s ratio for a specific range of θ and φ angles. Finally, a lightened 3D re-entrant structure is introduced, and its results are compared to those of the idealized 3D re-entrant structure.

Permeable porous implants must satisfy several physical and biological requirements in order to be promising materials for orthopaedic application: they should have the proper levels of stiffness, permeability, and fatigue resistance approximately matching the corresponding levels in bone tissues. This can be achieved using designer materials, which exhibit exotic properties, commonly known as metamaterials. In recent years, several experimental, numerical, and analytical studies have been carried out on the influence of unit cell micro-architecture on the mechanical and physical properties of metamaterials. Even though experimental and numerical approaches can study and predict the behaviour of different micro-structures effectively, they lack the ease and quickness provided by analytical relationships in predicting the answer. Although it is well known that Timoshenko beam theory is much more accurate in predicting the deformation of a beam (and as a result lattice structures), many of the already-existing relationships in the literature have been derived based on Euler–Bernoulli beam theory. The question that arises here is whether or not there exists a convenient way to convert the already-existing analytical relationships based on Euler–Bernoulli theory to relationships based on Timoshenko beam theory without the need to rewrite all the derivations from the start point. In this paper, this question is addressed and answered, and a handy and easy-to-use approach is presented. This technique is applied to six unit cell types (body-centred cubic (BCC), hexagonal packing, rhombicuboctahedron, diamond, truncated cube, and truncated octahedron) for which Euler–Bernoulli analytical relationships already exist in the literature while Timoshenko theory-based relationships could not be found. The results of this study demonstrated that converting analytical relationships based on Euler–Bernoulli to equivalent Timoshenko ones can decrease the difference between the analytical and numerical values for one order of magnitude, which is a significant improvement in accuracy of the analytical formulas. The methodology presented in this study is not only beneficial for improving the already-existing analytical relationships, but it also facilitates derivation of accurate analytical relationships for other, yet unexplored, unit cell types.

Stress shielding and micromotions are the most significant problems occurring at the bone-implants interface due to a mismatch of their mechanical properties. Mechanical 3D metamate-rials, with their exceptional behaviour and characteristics, can provide an opportunity to solve the mismatch of mechanical properties between the bone and implant. In this study, a new porous femoral hip meta-implant with graded Poisson’s ratio distribution was introduced and its results were compared to three other femoral hip implants (one solid implant, and two porous meta-implants, one with positive and the other with a negative distribution of Poisson’s ratio) in terms of stress and micromotion distributions. For this aim, first, a well-known auxetic 3D re-entrant structure was studied analytically, and precise closed-form analytical relationships for its elastic modulus and Poisson’s ratio were derived. The results of the analytical solution for mechanical properties of the 3D re-entrant structure presented great improvements in comparison to previous analytical studies on the structure. Moreover, the implementation of the re-entrant structure in the hip implant provided very smooth results for stress and strain distributions in the lattice meta-implants and could solve the stress shielding problem which occurred in the solid implant. The lattice meta-implant based on the graded unit cell distribution presented smoother stress-strain distribution in comparison with the other lattice meta-implants. Moreover, the graded lattice meta-implant gave minimum areas of local stress and local strain concentration at the contact region of the implants with the internal bone surfaces. Among all the cases, the graded meta-implant also gave micromotion levels which are the closest to values reported to be desirable for bone growth (40 µm).

In this study, the mechanical properties (elastic modulus, yield stress, and Poisson's ratio) of rhombic dodecahedron (RD) unit cell has been studied analytically and numerically. For the analytical study, two well-known beam theories, namely Euler Bernoulli and Timoshenko, have been implemented. For validating the analytical relationships, finite element model of unit cell with repetitive boundary condition has been created. Moreover, the experimental results of recent studies have been used for validation. The results showed that the presented analytical relationships for RD lattice structure have good agreement with numerical and experimental results in all the relative densities particularly in lower relative densities. Besides, the analytical relationships based on Timoshenko theory showed closer results with numerical/experimental data. The derived analytical relationships for RD as well as the data extracted from CT scan images of a femur bone, were combined and used to create a porous femur implant model. The stress and strain distributions of the porous femur model under typical static compressive load due to human weight as well as axial rigidity of the model in the same loading conditions have been obtained and compared with the experimental results from other studies. The stress and strain distributions of the porous femur implant model based on RD unit cells, as well as its axial rigidity, showed good agreement with the results obtained for human femur.

In this article, five fundamental unit cells namely BCC, hexagonal packing, rhombicuboctahedron, diamond, and truncated octahedron, for which there was a lack of accurate analytical yield stress relationship in the literature, were studied analytically and numerically using the Timoshenko and Euler–Bernoulli beam theories. Two different approaches based on force or displacement methods were considered. The results of the analytical models were validated against finite element models results as well as experimental data from literature. The results demonstrated that the newly developed analytical relationships based on Timoshenko beam theory give more accurate results as compared to Euler–Bernoulli beam theory, especially in higher values of relative densities.