Related papers: On the competition for ultimately stiff and strong…
Nature provides examples of self-assemble lightweight disordered network structures with remarkable mechanical properties which are desirable for many applications purposes but challenging to reproduce artificially. Previous experimental…
High strength and high toughness are usually mutually exclusive in engineering materials. Improving the toughness of strong but brittle materials like ceramics thus relies on the introduction of a metallic or polymeric ductile phase to…
Identifying and explaining the structure of complex networks at different scales has become an important problem across disciplines. At the mesoscale, modular architecture has attracted most of the attention. At the macroscale, other…
From self-assembly and protein folding to combinatorial metamaterials, a key challenge in material design is finding the right combination of interacting building blocks that yield targeted properties. Such structures are fiendishly…
In this paper, we propose a novel design and fabrication strategy to produce architected core structures for use as the core in composite sandwich structures. A traditional foam core or honeycomb structure is lightweight and stiff, but…
In recent years, new methods have been developed to synthesize complex porous and micro-structured geometry in a variety of ways. In this work, we take these approaches one step further and present these methods as an efficacious design…
Acoustic transparency is the capability of a medium to transmit mechanical waves to adjacent media, without scattering. This characteristic can be achieved by carefully engineering the acoustic impedance of the medium -- a combination of…
In this paper, lightweight metastructures are designed consisting of prismatic tensegrity building blocks which have excellent strength-to-weight ratio and also enable unique compression-torsion coupling. A theoretical model with coupled…
Honeycomb-like microstructures have been shown to exhibit local elastic buckling under compression, with three possible geometric buckling modes, or pattern transformations. The individual pattern transformations, and consequently also…
During the reversible insertion of ions, lattices in intercalation materials undergo structural transformations. These lattice transformations generate misfit strains and volume changes that, in turn, contribute to the structural decay of…
Topological Interlocking assemblies are arrangements of blocks kinematically constrained by a fixed frame, such that all rigid body motions of each block are constrained only by its permanent contact with other blocks and the frame. In the…
High capacity and scalable memory systems play a vital role in enabling our desktops, smartphones, and pervasive technologies like Internet of Things (IoT). Unfortunately, memory systems are becoming increasingly prone to faults. This is…
Our goal is to develop a design framework for multifunctional mechanical metamaterials that can tune their rigidity while optimizing other desired properties. Towards this goal, we first demonstrate that underconstrained central force…
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…
Architected materials that exploit buckling instabilities to reversibly trap energy have been shown to be effective for impact protection. The energy-absorbing capabilities of these architected materials can be enhanced further by…
Materials either have a high hardness or excellent ductility, but rarely both at the same time. Mo$_2$BC is one of the only crystalline materials that simultaneously has a high Vickers hardness and is also relatively ductile. The origin of…
The level-set method of topology optimization is used to design isotropic two-phase periodic multifunctional composites in three dimensions. One phase is stiff and insulating whereas the other is conductive and mechanically compliant. The…
The revolutionary advancements in metal additive manufacturing have enabled the production of alloy-based lattice structures with complex geometrical features and high resolutions. This has encouraged the development of nonlinear material…
Functional soft materials, comprising colloidal and molecular building blocks that self-organize into complex structures as a result of their tunable interactions, enable a wide array of technological applications. Inverse methods provide…
This paper studies the robustness of large-scale interconnected systems with respect to external disturbances, focussing on their scalability properties. Specifically, a notion of scalability is introduced that asks for these robustness…