Related papers: Programmable Mechanical Metamaterials: the Role of…

Mechanical metamaterials can be designed to exhibit unique mechanical properties, including tunable auxetic behavior as well as multi-stability, which arise from the geometry and configuration of the constituent building blocks.…

The classification of materials into insulators and conductors has been shaken up by the discovery of topological insulators that conduct robustly at the edge but not in the bulk. In mechanics, designating a material as insulating or…

Understanding and controlling the shape of thin, soft objects has been the focus of significant research efforts among physicists, biologists, and engineers in the last decade. These studies aim to utilize advanced materials in novel,…

Mechanical metamaterials made of flexible building blocks can exhibit a plethora of extreme mechanical responses, such as negative elastic constants, shape-changes, programmability and memory. To date, dissipation has largely remained…

Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…

Flexible control of the modal confinement in silicon photonic waveguides is an appealing feature for many applications, including sensing and hybrid integration of active materials. In most cases, strip waveguides are the preferred solution…

We report a three-dimensional mechanical metamaterial that simultaneously possesses negative stiffness, negative bulk modulus, and negative Poisson's ratio. This metamaterial is a periodic arrangement of binder-shell elements. Under…

Metamaterials exhibit materials response deviation from conventional elasticity. This phenomenon is captured by the generalized elasticity as a result of extending the theory at the expense of introducing additional parameters. These…

Jammed packings of granular materials display complex mechanical response. For example, the ensemble-averaged shear modulus $\left\langle G \right\rangle$ increases as a power-law in pressure $p$ for static packings of soft spherical…

Machine learning (ML) is emerging as a transformative tool for the design of architected materials, offering properties that far surpass those achievable through lab-based trial-and-error methods. However, a major challenge in current…

Granular metamaterials are a promising choice for the realization of mechanical computing devices. As preliminary evidence of this, we demonstrate here how to embed Boolean logic gates (AND and XOR) into a granular metamaterial by evolving…

Mechanical meta-materials are solids whose geometric structure results in exotic nonlinear behaviors that are not typically achievable via homogeneous materials. We show how to drastically expand the design space of a class of mechanical…

Topological metamaterials have invaded the mechanical world, demonstrating acoustic cloaking and waveguiding at finite frequencies and variable, tunable elastic response at zero frequency. Zero frequency topological states have previously…

Tetrachiral materials are characterized by a cellular microstructure made by a periodic pattern of stiff rings and flexible ligaments. Their mechanical behaviour can be described by a planar lattice of rigid massive bodies and elastic…

We introduce a compact yet highly expressive design space for shellular metamaterials. By employing only a few dozen degrees of freedom, this design space represents geometries ranging from simple planar configurations to complex triply…

While the design of always new metamaterials with exotic static and dynamic properties is attracting deep attention in the last decades, little effort is made to explore their interactions with other materials. This prevents the conception…

This study examines the mechanical behavior of a novel class of mechanical metamaterials alternating pentamode lattices and stiffening plates. The unit cell of such lattices consists of a sub-lattice of the face cubic-centered unit cell…

Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional…

A buckled sheet offers a reservoir of material that can be unfurled at a later time. For sufficiently thin yet stiff materials, this geometric process has a striking mechanical feature: when the slack runs out, the material locks to further…

Mechanical metamaterials are usually designed to show desired responses to prescribed forces. In some applications, the desired force-response relationship might be hard to specify exactly, although examples of forces and corresponding…