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Nature has engineered complex designs to achieve advanced properties and functionalities through evolution, over millions of years. Many organisms have adapted to their living environment producing extremely efficient materials and…

Quasi-brittle behavior where macroscopic failure is preceded by stable damaging and intensive cracking activity is a desired feature of materials because it makes fracture predictable. Based on a fiber bundle model with global load sharing…

Atomically thin metallenes have properties attractive for applications, but they are intrinsically unstable and require delicate stabilization in pores or other nano-constrictions. Substrates provide solid support, but metallenes' wanted…

Soft yet tough materials are ubiquitous in nature and everyday life. The ratio between fracture toughness and intrinsic fracture energy of a soft material defines its toughness enhancement. Soft materials' toughness enhancement has been…

Lattice-like structures can provide a combination of high stiffness with light weight that is useful in many applications, but a resolved finite element mesh of such structures results in a computationally expensive discretization. This…

The relevant parameters at the microstructure scale that govern the macroscopic toughness of disordered brittle materials are investigated theoretically. We focus on planar crack propagation and describe the front evolution as the…

Nowadays, additive manufacturing processes greatly simplify the production of openwork workpiece providing new opportunities for workpieces design. Based on Nature knowledge, a new bio-inspired workpiece structural optimization approach is…

Topology optimization (TO) has experienced a dramatic development over the last decades aided by the arising of metamaterials and additive manufacturing (AM) techniques, and it is intended to achieve the current and future challenges. In…

Heterogeneous materials are often organized in a hierarchical manner, where a basic unit is repeated over multiple scales.The structure then acquires a self-similar pattern. Examples of such structure are found in various biological and…

This work presents a computational method for the design of architected truss lattice materials where each strut can be made of one of a set of available materials. We design the lattices to extremize effective properties. As customary in…

Compliant mechanisms actuated by pneumatic loads are receiving increasing attention due to their direct applicability as soft robots that perform tasks using their flexible bodies. Using multiple materials to build them can further improve…

High-throughput characterization of architected materials across a wide range of length scales enables rapid screening of topologies for engineering applications. Scaled-down specimens manufactured and evaluated in laboratory environments…

In order to design tougher materials, it is crucial to understand the relationship between their composition and their resistance to fracture. To this end, we investigate the fracture toughness of usual sodium silicate glasses (NS) and…

Progresses in additive manufacturing technologies allow the realization of finely graded microstructured materials with tunable mechanical properties. This paves the way to a wealth of innovative applications, calling for the combined…

Recent developments in topological mechanics have demonstrated the ability of Maxwell lattices to effectively focus stress along domain walls between differently polarized domains. The focusing ability can be exploited to protect the…

Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…

Soft materials capable of large inelastic deformation play an essential role in high-performance nacre-inspired architectured materials with a combination of stiffness, strength and toughness. The rigid "building blocks" made from glass or…

States of self-stress, tensions and compressions of structural elements that result in zero net forces, play an important role in determining the load-bearing ability of structures ranging from bridges to metamaterials with tunable…

Topology optimization of microstructures plays a critical role in optimizing functional performance across diverse engineering applications. While metamaterials with enhanced mechanical properties -- such as hyperelasticity, energy…

The ability to design and synthesize ever more complicated colloidal particles opens the possibility of self-assembling a zoo of complex structures, including those with one or more self-limited length scales. An undesirable feature of…