A hybrid approach to design materials with negative linear compressibility

•A methodology is developed to design materials with negative linear compressibility.•The developed hybrid methodology offers a wide range of solutions.•The method allows tailoring materials with prescribed negative compressibility. A powerful hybrid methodology is proposed in this paper to design materials with negative linear compressibility. The proposed methodology is an integration of genetic algorithm and finite element method. The problem of designing materials with negative linear compressibility is formulated as an optimisation problem of finding structures with prescribed behavioural requirements. Genetic algorithm is used to generate and evolve several structures and then finite element method is used to evaluate the fitness of each structure in competition with the others. Using a number of numerical examples it is shown that it is possible to design a wide range of structures each with a different value of negative linear compressibility. The proposed methodology can also be used as an effective tool to tailor new materials with prescribed values of compressibility. The developed structures using the proposed methodology can exhibit the required behaviour in any geometrical scale (i.e. nano, micro or macro structure).