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Carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites offer a unique combination of in-plane specific strength and stiffness. They, however, suffer from a relatively poor out-of plane performance. Improving this requires a thorough…
Recent advances in additive manufacturing methods make it possible, for the first time, to manufacture complex micro-architectured solids that achieve desired stress versus strain responses. Here, we report experimental measurements and…
A floating air bag, ballasted in water, expands and contracts as it heaves under wave action. Connecting the bag to a secondary volume via a turbine transforms the bag into a device capable of generating useful energy from the waves.…
With the ever-growing need to reduce energy consumption, building materials that passively heat or cool are gaining importance. However, many buildings require both heating and cooling, even within the same day. To date, few technologies…
Using an alternative mechanism to dissipation or scattering, bistable structures and mechanical metamaterials have shown promise for mitigating the detrimental effects of impact by reversibly locking energy into strained material. Herein,…
Designing materials that can effectively and repeatedly absorb energy from unpredictable directions represents a grand challenge in modern engineering, crucial for applications from vehicle crashworthiness systems to personal protective…
Growing energy demands of modern digital devices necessitate alternative, low-power computing mechanisms. When incident loads take the form of acoustic or vibrational waves, the ability to mechanically process information eliminates the…
Liquid Crystal Elastomers (LCEs) are an exciting category of material that has tremendous application potential across a variety of fields, owing to their unique properties that enable both sensing and actuation. To some, LCEs are simply…
Porous metallic structures are regularly used in electrochemical energy storage devices as supports, current collectors or active electrode materials. Bulk metal porosification, dealloying, welding or chemical synthesis routes involving…
Adaptive structures are of interest for their ability to dynamically modify mechanical properties post fabrication, enabling structural performance that is responsive to environmental uncertainty and changing loading conditions. Dynamic…
Commonly used linear and nonlinear constitutive material models in deformation simulation contain many simplifications and only cover a tiny part of possible material behavior. In this work we propose a framework for learning customized…
The transport of motile entities across modulated energy landscapes plays an important role in a range of phenomena in biology, colloidal science and solid-state physics. Here, an easily implementable strategy that allows for the collective…
We investigate the role of architected thin films in the interfacial failure properties of bi-layer composites. Our results show that, while graded structures can be used to prescribe failure at the interface, they do not offer significant…
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.…
This paper examines various ways of improving the impact resilience of protective structures. Such structures' purpose is to dissipate an impact's energy while avoiding cracking and failure. We have tested the reaction of plane…
Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally-responsive materials therefore open up the possibility of creating a…
This study addresses the modelling of elastic bodies, particularly when the relaxed configuration is unknown or non-existent. We adopt the theory of initially stressed materials, incorporating the deformation gradient and stress state of…
Sound absorption is an important technological task in machine-building and civil engineering. Porous materials are traditionally used for these purposes, as they are neither ignitable nor hygroscopic and thus suitable for noise oppression,…
Reprogrammable mechanical metamaterials, composed of a lattice of discretely adaptive elements, are emerging as a promising platform for mechanical intelligence. To operate in unknown environments, such structures must go beyond passive…
We investigate the damping enhancement in a class of biomimetic staggered composites via a combination of design, modeling, and experiment. In total, three kinds of staggered composites are designed by mimicking the structure of bone and…