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Dual-material lattices with tailorable coefficients of thermal expansion have been applied to a wide range of modern engineering systems. As supporting techniques for fabricating dual-material lattices with given coefficients of thermal expansion, the current existing methods for measuring the coefficient of thermal expansion have limited anti-interference ability. They ignore the measuring error caused by micro-displacement between the measurement sensor and the test sample. In this paper, we report a robust interferometric test method which can eliminate the measurement error caused by micro-displacement between the measurement sensor and the test sample. In the presented method, two parallel plane lenses are utilized to avoid the measurement error caused by translation, and the right lens is utilized as an angle detector to eliminate the measurement error caused by rotation. A robust interferometric testing setup was established using a distance measuring set and two plane lenses. The experiment results indicated that the method can avoid the measurement error induced by translation and has the potential to eliminate the measurement error induced by rotation using the rotational angle. This method can improve the anti-interference ability and accuracy by eliminating the measurement error. It is especially useful for high-precision thermal expansion measurement of dual-material lattices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative thermal expansion (NTE) lattices are widely used in aerospace engineering where the structures experience large temperature variation. However, the available range of NTE of the current lattices is quite narrow, which severely limits their engineering application. In this paper, we report an inverted trapezoid lattice (ITL) with large NTE. The NTE of the ITL is 2.6 times that of a typical triangular lattice with the same height and hypotenuse angle. Theoretically, with a pin-jointed assumption, the ITL can improve the NTE by order of magnitude if the length ratio of the composite rod is changed. In the presented ITL, a composite rod is utilized as the base of the ITL. The composite rod has large inner NTE. The inverted trapezoid structure converts the inner NTE to the vertical direction contraction and obtains an extra NTE. Finite element simulations and experimental verification by interferometric measurement were conducted to verify the large thermal expansion of the ITL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]