Related papers: Spider-Web Inspired Mechanical Metamaterials
Orb-weaving spiders primarily sense leg vibrations to detect and locate prey caught on their wheel-shaped webs. Biological experiments and computational modeling elucidated the physics of how these spiders use long-timescale web-building…
Aperiodic metamaterials represent a class of structural systems that are composed of different building blocks (cells), instead of a self-repeating chain of the same unit cells. Optimizing aperiodic cellular structural systems thus presents…
A recently proposed class of materials, called software-defined metamaterials, can change their electromagnetic behavior on demand, utilizing a nanonetwork embedded in their structure. The present work focuses on 2D metamaterials, known as…
This study theoretically and experimentally investigates the transmission properties of a metamaterial slab comprised of two layers of metallic fish-scale structure arrays and a sandwiched dielectric layer. Calculations show that the…
Soft electronics have recently gathered considerable interest thanks to their bio-mechanical compatibility. An important feature of such deformable conductors is their electrical response to strain. While development of stretchable…
Non-reciprocal transmission of motion is potentially highly beneficial to a wide range of applications, ranging from wave guiding, to shock and vibration damping and energy harvesting. To date, large levels of non-reciprocity have been…
As a result of evolution, many biological materials have developed irregular structures that lead to outstanding mechanical properties, like high stiffness-to-weight ratios and good energy absorption. To reproduce these properties in…
Harnessing the rich nonlinear dynamics of highly-deformable materials has the potential to unlock the next generation of functional smart materials and devices. However, unlocking such potential requires effective strategies to spatially…
Spider monkeys (genus Ateles) have a prehensile tail that functions as a flexible, multipurpose fifth limb, enabling them to navigate complex terrains, grasp objects of various sizes, and swing between supports. Inspired by the spider…
The adaptive and surprising emergent properties of biological materials self-assembled in far-from-equilibrium environments serve as an inspiration for efforts to design nanomaterials and their properties. In particular, controlling the…
Topological acoustic and elastic waves have recently emerged as an exciting interdisciplinary field which is still mainly focused on low-dimensional structures and model systems. Here we demonstrate numerically an elastic-wave analogue of…
The field of metamaterial research revolves around the idea of creating artificial media that interact with light in a way unknown from naturally occurring materials. This is commonly achieved by creating sub-wavelength lattices of…
In the past two decades, artificial structures known as metamaterials have been found to exhibit extraordinary material properties that enable the unprecedented manipulation of electromagnetic waves, elastic waves, molecules, and particles.…
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…
Current strategies for designing tunable locally resonant metamaterials are based on tuning the stiffness of the resonator; however, this approach presents a major shortcoming as the effective mass density is constant at high frequency.…
The dynamics of soft mechanical metamaterials provides opportunities for many exciting engineering applications. Previous studies often use discrete systems, composed of rigid elements and nonlinear springs, to model the nonlinear dynamic…
Snapping beams enable rapid geometric transitions through nonlinear instability, offering an efficient means of generating motion in soft robotic systems. In this study, a tendon-driven mechanism consisting of spiral-based metabeams was…
Mechanism - collections of rigid elements coupled by perfect hinges which exhibit a zero-energy motion -- motivate the design of a variety of mechanical metamaterials. We significantly enlarge this design space by considering…
Shape-morphing metamaterials enable adaptive structures capable of complex functional deformations, with applications ranging from reconfigurable structures and soft robotics to medical devices. However, their design remains challenging due…
Materials engineered at the micro- and nano-meter scale have had a tremendous and lasting impact in photonics and phononics, with applications ranging from periodic structures disallowing light and sound propagation at stop band…