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Mechanical metamaterials are architected manmade materials that allow for unique behaviors not observed in nature, making them promising candidates for a wide range of applications. Existing metamaterials lack tunability as their properties…
Magnetic elastomers are appealing materials from an application point of view: they combine the mechanical softness and deformability of polymeric substances with the addressability by external magnetic fields. In this way, mechanical…
Thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPU) are block copolymeric materials composed of plastomeric "hard" and elastomeric "soft" domains, by which they exhibit highly resilient yet dissipative large deformation features depending on volume fractions…
Micro-robots for, e.g., biomedical applications, need to be equipped with motility strategies that enable them to navigate through complex environments. Inspired by biological microorganisms we recreate motility patterns such as…
Modeling arbitrarily large deformations of surfaces smoothly embedded in three-dimensional space is challenging. The difficulties come from two aspects: the existing geometry processing or forward simulation methods penalize the difference…
Soft slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems and can be observed at scales that range from the nanometric to the kilometric, from polymers to space tethers. We present a practical numerical approach to simulate…
In the perspective of developing smart hybrid materials with customized features, ferrogels and magnetorheological elastomers allow a synergy of elasticity and magnetism. The interplay between elastic and magnetic properties gives rise to a…
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…
Catch bonds are interactions whose lifetimes increase under mechanical load, a counterintuitive behaviour that underlies diverse biological processes. Translating this mechanism to synthetic materials offers the potential to create systems…
Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…
The electronic properties of two-dimensional materials and their heterostructures can be dramatically altered by varying the relative angle between the layers. This makes it theoretically possible to realize a new class of twistable…
A highly deformable rod, modelled as the extensible elastica, is connected to a movable clamp at one end and to a pin sliding along a frictionless curved profile at the other. Bifurcation analysis shows that axial compliance provides a…
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…
Local rearrangements are the elements of plastic deformation in an amorphous solid. In oscillatory shear, they can switch reversibly between two distinct configurations. While these repeating relaxations are typically considered in the…
Advanced flexible electronics and soft robotics require the development and implementation of flexible functional materials. Magnetoelectric (ME) oxide materials can convert magnetic input into electric output and vice versa, making them…
In this letter, we investigate the geometrically tailorable elasticity in the twisting behavior of biomimetic scale-covered slender soft substrate. Motivated by our qualitative experiments showing a significant torsional rigidity increase,…
Durable interfacing of hard and soft materials is a major design challenge caused by the ensuing stress concentrations. In nature, soft-hard interfaces exhibit remarkable mechanical performance, with failures rarely happening at the…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Passive transformation of waves via nonlinear systems is ubiquitous in settings ranging from acoustics to optics and electromagnetics. Passivity is of particular importance for responding rapidly to stimuli and nonlinearity enormously…
A multiscale (micro-to-macro) analysis is proposed for the prediction of the finite strain behavior of composites with hyperelastic constituents and embedded localized damage. The composites are assumed to possess periodic microstructure…