Staggered architectures widely seen in load-bearing biological materials provide not only excellent supporting functions resisting static loading but also brilliant protecting functions attenuating the dynamic impact. However, there are very few efforts to unveil the relationship between staggered architectures and damping properties within load-bearing biological and bioinspired materials, while its static counterpart has been intensively studied over the past decades. Here, based on the Floquet theory, we developed a new generic method to evaluate the dynamic modulus of the composites with various staggered architectures. Comparisons with the finite element method results showed that the new method can give more accurate predictions than previous methods based on the tension-shear chain model. Moreover, the new method is more generic and applicable for two- and three-dimensional arbitrarily staggered architectures. This method provides a useful tool to understand the relationship between micro-architecture and damping property in natural load-bearing biological materials and to facilitate the architectural design of high-damping bioinspired composites.
Portable magnetic tweezers device enables visualization of the three-dimensional microscale deformation of soft biological materials