Related papers: Heterogeneous Digital Stiffness Programming
Crystal plasticity models connect macroscopic deformation with the physics of microscale slip in polycrystalline materials. These models can be calibrated using global stress-strain curves, but the resulting parametrization is often not…
This paper presents an interaction control algorithm for a dielectric elastomer membrane actuator. The proposed method permits efficient exploitation of the controllable stiffness of the material, allowing to use the membrane as a…
A micromorphic computational homogenization framework has recently been developed to deal with materials showing long-range correlated interactions, i.e. displaying patterning modes. Typical examples of such materials are elastomeric…
Soft composite solids, comprising discrete inclusions embedded within a compliant matrix, are emerging candidates for engineering synthetic tissues and soft robotic materials. Current strategies for controlling their nonlinear mechanics,…
Incremental stiffness characterizes the variation of a material's force response to a small deformation change. Typically materials have an incremental stiffness that is fixed and positive, but recent technologies, such as super-lenses, low…
Elastic instabilities such as buckling and snapping have evolved into a powerful design principle, enabling memory, sequential shape morphing, and computing in metamaterials and devices. Modifying the post-buckling configurations or their…
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…
Various two-dimensional fabrication methods, such as deposition, etching, milling, laser cutting, and water jetting, suffer from asymmetry between the top and the bottom surface of fabricated parts. Such asymmetry is usually undesirable and…
Nematic elastomers and glasses are solids that display spontaneous distortion under external stimuli. Recent advances in the synthesis of sheets with controlled heterogeneities have enabled their actuation into non-trivial shapes with…
Based on the idea of variable stiffness mechanisms, a variety of such mechanisms is shown in this work. Specifically, 2-DOF parallel kinematic machines equipped with redundant actuators and non-linear springs in the actuated joints are…
Spectral gaps in the vibrational modes of disordered solids are key design elements in the synthesis and control of phononic metamaterials that exhibit a plethora of novel elastic and mechanical properties. However, reliably producing these…
Origami designs offer extreme reconfigurability due to hinge rotation and facet deformation. This can be exploited to make lightweight metamaterials with controlled deployability and tunable properties. Here, we create a family of…
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…
Mechanical metamaterials capable of large deformations are an emerging platform for functional devices and structures across scales. Bistable designs are particularly attractive since they endow a single object with two configurations that…
Aperiodic metamaterials represent a class of structural systems that are composed of different building blocks (cells), instead of a self-repeating chain of the same unit cells. Optimizing aperiodic cellular structural systems thus presents…
Tissues commonly consist of cells embedded within a fibrous biopolymer network. Whereas cell-free reconstituted biopolymer networks typically soften under applied uniaxial compression, various tissues, including liver, brain, and fat, have…
Disordered hyperuniform heterogeneous materials are new, exotic amorphous states of matter that behave like crystals in the manner in which they suppress volume-fraction fluctuations at large length scales, and yet are statistically…
Soft electroactive materials can undergo large deformation subjected to either mechanical or electrical stimulus, and hence they can be excellent candidates for designing extremely flexible and adaptive structures and devices. This paper…
Disordered solids exhibit unusual properties of their vibrational states and thermal conductivities. Recent progresses have well established the concept of "elastic heterogeneity", i.e., disordered materials show spatially inhomogeneous…
Partition of unity methods, such as the extended finite element method (XFEM) allow discontinuities to be simulated independently of the mesh [1]. This eliminates the need for the mesh to be aligned with the discontinuity or cumbersome…