Mechanical behaviour of tube-woven Kagome truss cores under compression

Wire-woven bulk Kagome (WBK) has recently been used to fabricate multi-layered truss-type cellular metals. A tube WBK structure is fabricated of tubes instead of solid wires. In this work, tube WBK specimens with various combinations of slenderness ratio and inner-to-outer diameter ratio of the tubular struts were tested under compression to investigate the effects of geometric factors on peak strength, equivalent Young′s modulus and energy absorption capability. To aid in the physical interpretation of the results and the development of a design methodology, numerical simulations of single tubular struts were performed with a wide range of slenderness ratio and inner-to-outer diameter ratio. The tube WBKs outperformed most cellular metals, but they were inferior to hollow trusses, especially those with a diamond configuration. However, energy absorption of the tube WBKs was comparable to that of hollow trusses because of stable deformation of the tube WBKs after initial yielding or maximum strength.