Phononic band gap design in honeycomb lattice with combinations of auxetic and conventional core

We present a novel design of a honeycomb lattice geometry that uses a seamless combination of conventional and auxetic cores, i.e. elements showing positive and negative Poisson's ratio. The design is aimed at tuning and improving the band structure of periodic cellular structures. The proposed cellular configurations show a significantly wide band gap at much lower frequencies compared to their pure counterparts, while still retaining their major dynamic features. Different topologies involving both auxetic inclusions in a conventional lattice and conversely hexagonal cellular inclusions in auxetic butterfly lattices are presented. For all these cases the impact of the varying degree of auxeticity on the band structure is evaluated. The proposed cellular designs may offer significant advantages in tuning high-frequency bandgap behaviour, which is relevant to phononics applications. The configurations shown in this paper may be made iso-volumetric and iso-weight to a given regular hexagonal topology, making possible to adapt the hybrid lattices to existing sandwich structures with fixed dimensions and weights. This work also features a comparative study of the wave speeds corresponding to different configurations vis-a vis those of a regular honeycomb to highlight the superior behaviour of the combined hybrid lattice.