In-Plane Dynamic Crushing of a Novel Bio-Inspired Beetle Honeycomb with Zero Poisson’s Ratio

Honeycomb structures are widely used in various fields due to their excellent compressive properties. However, most existing honeycomb structures have positive or negative Poisson’s ratios, which can easily cause overall instability during failure. Inspired by the asymmetric upper and lower structures of the diabolical ironclad beetle’s exoskeleton, this paper proposes a novel bio-inspired beetle honeycomb (BBH) structure with a zero Poisson’s ratio (ZPR) feature. A combination of experiments and finite element (FE) simulations was used to study the compressive mechanical behavior of BBH under different impact velocities. The results show that the ZPR of BBH significantly enhances the structural stability and greatly improves its compressive performance. The structure exhibits a pronounced dual-platform stress response, with the secondary platform stress increasing by 221.07% compared to the primary platform stress. This is 93.45% higher than that of the re-entrant auxetic honeycomb (RSH) structure. Finally, through parametric analysis, the effects of thickness, impact velocity, aspect ratio of the long and short axes, and slant angle on the compressive mechanical behavior of BBH were quantitatively revealed. This study provides a new biomimetic optimization design framework for the development of high-performance impact-resistant honeycomb structures. It has significant application value in aerospace, vehicle collision protection, construction, and other engineering fields.