Zhang Li-Yuan, Li Yue, Xu Guang-Kui, Feng Xi-Qiao
School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, People's Republic of China.
Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, People's Republic of China.
Proc Math Phys Eng Sci. 2019 Aug;475(2228):20180812. doi: 10.1098/rspa.2018.0812. Epub 2019 Aug 28.
Tensegrities, consisting of axially pre-compressed bars and pre-stretched strings, hold broad applications in the design of, for instance, architectures, soft robotics and metamaterials. In this paper, we propose an enumeration-screening method to design planar tensegrities of simple polygonal shapes. In such a polygonal tensegrity, the strings are joined pair-wise to form a simple polygon (a planar shape consisting of straight, non-intersecting line segments) and only one bar is added at each node. The total number of simple polygonal tensegrities designed by this scheme increases exponentially with the number of bars. Moreover, we demonstrate that each of these designed topologies can produce a self-equilibrated and stable tensegrity configuration. This work helps understand the topological features of simple polygonal tensegrities, which can be used as elementary cells to design some novel two- and three-dimensional tensegrity structures.
张拉整体结构由轴向预压杆和预拉弦组成，在建筑、软体机器人和超材料等设计领域有广泛应用。在本文中，我们提出一种枚举筛选方法来设计简单多边形形状的平面张拉整体结构。在这种多边形张拉整体结构中，弦两两相连形成一个简单多边形（由直的、不相交线段组成的平面形状），并且在每个节点仅添加一根杆。通过该方案设计的简单多边形张拉整体结构的总数随杆的数量呈指数增长。此外，我们证明这些设计出的拓扑结构中的每一个都能产生自平衡且稳定的张拉整体构型。这项工作有助于理解简单多边形张拉整体结构的拓扑特征，其可作为基本单元来设计一些新颖的二维和三维张拉整体结构。
