The Basic Symmetric X-Structure

As the early attempt in this series of bio-inspired X-structure studies, we investigated the scissor-like structures. Our study has been motivated to explore nonlinear benefits in engineering systems with a critical focus on how to conveniently design and realize beneficial nonlinearity as expected in stiffness and damping of a practical system under study. Initially, our attention is drawn to biological systems due to their special muscle-tendon-bone structures and also internal structures of bones. It should be noted that, together with the result in Sun et al. (2014b) and Xue (2013), the results in this chapter should be the first piece of research results about the nonlinear stiffness and damping characteristics of the X-shaped structures. At the beginning, we actually studied the scissor-like deployable structures in Xue (2013) purely with only simulation analysis, since it is very close to the targeted so-called bio-inspired structures to be introduced in the next chapters