Related papers: A jigsaw puzzle metamaterial concept
Mechanical metamaterials exhibit exotic properties at the system level, that emerge from the interactions of many nearly rigid building blocks. Determining these emergent properties theoretically has remained an open challenge outside of a…
The ability to design passive structures that perform different operations on different electromagnetic fields is key to many technologies, from beam-steering to optical computing. While many techniques have been developed to optimise…
We propose a novel approach for efficient tuning of the transmission characteristics of metamaterials through a continuous adjustment of the lattice structure, and confirm it experimentally in the microwave range. The concept is rather…
Ordered mechanical systems typically have one or only a few stable rest configurations, and hence are not considered useful for encoding memory. Multistable and history-dependent responses usually emerge from quenched disorder, for example…
Topology optimization of modular structures and mechanisms enables balancing the performance of automatically-generated individualized designs, as required by Industry 4.0, with enhanced sustainability by means of component reuse. For…
Materials which feature bistable elements, hysterons, exhibit memory effects. Often these hysterons are difficult to observe or control directly. Here we introduce a mechanical metamaterial in which slender elements, interacting with…
The ability to control forces between sub-micron-scale building blocks offers considerable potential for designing new materials through self-assembly. A typical paradigm is to first identify a particular (crystal) structure that has some…
We apply a rigorous eigenmode analysis to study the electromagnetic properties of linear and weakly nonlinear metamaterials. The nonlinear response can be totally described by the linear eigenmodes when weak nonlinearities are attributed to…
Embedding magnetic colloidal particles in an elastic polymer matrix leads to smart soft materials that can reversibly be addressed from outside by external magnetic fields. We discover a pronounced nonlinear superelastic stress-strain…
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…
It is shown that a new type of metamaterial, a 3D-array of toroidal solenoids, displays a significant toroidal response that can be readily measured. This is in sharp contrast to materials that exist in nature, where the toroidal component…
Cellular solids and micro-lattices are a class of lightweight architected materials that have been established for their unique mechanical, thermal, and acoustic properties. It has been shown that by tuning material architecture, a…
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…
Elastic cylindrical shells are fitted with an internal mechanism which is optimized so that, in the quasi-static regime, the combined system exhibits prescribed effective acoustic properties. The mechanism consists of a central mass…
Here, inspired by the operation of conventional semiconductor transistors, we introduce a novel class of bulk materials with nonreciprocal and non-Hermitian electromagnetic response. Our analysis shows that material nonlinearities combined…
Auxetics refers to structures or materials with a negative Poisson's ratio, thereby capable of exhibiting counter-intuitive behaviors. Herein, auxetic structures are exploited to design mechanically tunable metamaterials in both planar and…
When tensioned, ordinary materials expand along the direction of the applied force. Here, we explore network concepts to design metamaterials exhibiting negative compressibility transitions, during which a material undergoes contraction…
We examine layered metamaterial structures consisting of alternating films of epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) and dielectric material, and show that for such a stack it is possible to enhance the refractive, reflective or absorptive properties of…
The paper extends and enhances in several ways the recently proposed homogenization theory of metamaterials [J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 28, 577 (2011)]. The theory is based on a direct analysis of fields in the lattice cells rather than on an…
Regrasping on fixtures is a promising approach to reduce pose uncertainty in robotic assembly, but conventional rigid fixtures lack adaptability and require dedicated designs for each part. To overcome this limitation, we propose a soft jig…