Authors: Tingwei Wang, Jingjun Yu, and Hongzhe Zhao
The thermally driven expansion mechanism with high intra-unit efficiency and low inter-unit coupling as the functional cell of metamaterials provides a novel and promising solution for heat dissipation. In this paper, the rigid-compliant hybrid cellular expansion mechanisms with motion amplification and superposition are proposed. Compared with existing studies, the expansion mechanism is not only easy to realize the plane tessellation with low inter-unit coupling due to its regular polygon structure, but also has the ability of motion amplification and superposition due to its compliant displacement amplifier and rigid scissors, which shows high intra-unit efficiency. The scheme design including configuration, the theoretical modeling, the discussion including the performances of plane tessellations under area constraint, and the verification are achieved, which show prospects of the proposed expansion mechanisms in the field of mechanism design such as metamaterials.