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Mechanical and phononic metamaterials exhibiting negative elastic moduli, gapped vibrational spectra, or topologically protected modes enable precise control of structural and acoustic functionalities. While much progress has been made in…
Combinatorial mechanical metamaterials feature spatially textured soft modes that yield exotic and useful mechanical properties. While a single soft mode often can be rationally designed by following a set of tiling rules for the building…
Emerging multi-material 3D printing techniques have paved the way for the rational design of metamaterials with not only complex geometries but also arbitrary distributions of multiple materials within those geometries. Varying the spatial…
Mechanical metamaterials have continued to offer unprecedented tunability in mechanical properties, but most designs to date have prioritized attaining high stiffness and strength while sacrificing deformability. The emergence of woven…
Architected materials can achieve enhanced properties compared to their plain counterparts. Specific architecting serves as a powerful design lever to achieve targeted behavior without changing the base material. Thus, the connection…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials are compliant structures engineered to achieve unique properties via the large deformation of their components. While their static character has been studied extensively, the study of their dynamic…
The nonlinear response of driven complex materials -- disordered magnets, amorphous media, crumpled sheets -- features intricate transition pathways where the system repeatedly hops between metastable states. % which encode memory effects.…
Cells control fluid flows with a spatial and temporal precision that far exceeds the capabilities of current microfluidic technologies. Cells achieve this superior spatio-temporal control by harnessing dynamic networks of cytoskeleton and…
Mechanical metamaterials are those structures designed to convey force and motion in novel and desirable ways. Recently, Kane and Lubensky showed that lattices at the point of marginal mechanical stability (Maxwell lattices) possess a…
We describe a combined experimental and theoretical investigation of shape-morphing structures assembled by actuating composite (Janus) fibers, taking into account multiple relevant factors affecting shape transformations, such as strain…
Machines are designed, assembled, and programmed to convert power into predetermined dynamics and functions. In contrast, living systems such as interacting cells and animal groups self-organize, synchronize, and perform complex tasks…
Conforming materials to rigid substrates with Gaussian curvature --- positive for spheres and negative for saddles --- has proven a versatile tool to guide the self-assembly of defects such as scars, pleats, folds, blisters, and liquid…
As humans, we regularly associate shape of an object with its built material. In the context of geometric modeling, however, this interrelation between form and material is rarely explored. In this work, we propose a novel data-driven…
An optimal control strategy is developed to construct nanostructures of desired geometry along line segments by means of directed self-assembly of charged particles. Such a control strategy determines the electric potentials of a set of…
Auxetic materials become thicker rather than thinner when stretched, exhibiting an unusual negative Poisson's ratio well suited for designing shape transforming metamaterials. Current auxetic designs, however, are often monostable and…
Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…
To help mitigate road congestion caused by the unrelenting growth of traffic demand, many transportation authorities have implemented managed lane policies, which restrict certain freeway lanes to certain types of vehicles. It was…
Mechanical metamaterials owe their extraordinary properties and functionalities to their micro-/nanoscale design of which shape, including both geometry and topology, is perhaps the most important aspect. 4D printing enables programmed,…
Mechanical metamaterials, whose unique mechanical properties stem from their structural design rather than material constituents, are gaining popularity in engineering applications. In particular, recent advances in self-assembly techniques…
Self-shaping of curved structures, especially those involving flexible thin layers, has attracted increasing attention because of their broad potential applications in e.g. nanoelectromechanical/micro-electromechanical systems (NEMS/MEMS),…