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Combinatorial mechanical metamaterials are made of anisotropic, flexible blocks, such that multiple metamaterials may be constructed using a single block type, and the system's response depends on the frustration (or its absence) due to the…
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…
Torque and continuous rotation are fundamental methods of actuation and manipulation in rigid robots. Soft robot arms use soft materials and structures to mimic the passive compliance of biological arms that bend and extend. This use of…
Multi-step pathways, constituted of a sequence of reconfigurations, are central to a wide variety of natural and man-made systems. Such pathways autonomously execute in self-guided processes such as protein folding and self-assembly, but…
We design, simulate and experimentally characterise a reconfigurable elastic metamaterial with beyond-nearest-neighbour (BNN) coupling. The structure is composed from the popular British model construction system, Meccano$^{\text{TM}}$. The…
Current strategies for designing tunable locally resonant metamaterials are based on tuning the stiffness of the resonator; however, this approach presents a major shortcoming as the effective mass density is constant at high frequency.…
Aging populations and the rising prevalence of neurological and musculoskeletal disorders increase the demand for wearable mobility assistive devices that are effective, comfortable, and anatomically compatible. Many existing systems use…
Mechanical metamaterials, whose unique mechanical properties stem from their structural design rather than material constituents, are gaining popularity in engineering applications. In particular, recent advances in self-assembly techniques…
Embedding magnetic colloidal particles in an elastic polymer matrix leads to smart soft materials that can reversibly be addressed from outside by external magnetic fields. We discover a pronounced nonlinear superelastic stress-strain…
Simple local interactions can cause primitive building blocks to self-assemble into complex and functional patterns. However, even for a small number of blocks, there exist a vast number of possible configurations that are plausible,…
There is a growing need for robots that can change their shape, size and mechanical properties to adapt to evolving tasks and environments. However, current shape-changing systems generally utilize bespoke, system-specific mechanisms that…
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…
The adaptive and surprising emergent properties of biological materials self-assembled in far-from-equilibrium environments serve as an inspiration for efforts to design nanomaterials and their properties. In particular, controlling the…
Acoustic metamaterials offer exceptional control over wave propagation, but their potential remains unfulfilled due to fabrication constraints. Conventional processes yield mostly rigid, planar structures, whereas soft-matter alternatives…
Body-Centred Cubic (BCC) lattices with twinned meta-crystal architecture inspired by the strengthening of bulk metals have significantly improved mechanical performance; however, their deformation behaviour and underlying strengthening…
Mechanical metamaterials made of flexible building blocks can exhibit a plethora of extreme mechanical responses, such as negative elastic constants, shape-changes, programmability and memory. To date, dissipation has largely remained…
Metamaterials are artificially engineered devices that go beyond the properties of conventional materials in nature. Metamaterials allow the creation of negative refractive indexes, light trapping with epsilon-near-zero compounds, bandgap…
In this paper, we present a unit cell showing a band-gap in the lower acoustic domain. The corresponding metamaterial is made up of a periodic arrangement of this unit cell. We rigorously show that the relaxed micromorphic model can be used…
Metamaterials benefit from unique architected patterns to achieve lightweight with exceptional mechanical properties inaccessible to conventional materials. Typical mechanical metamaterials are inspired by crystal-like lattice structures,…
Metamaterials are constructed such that, for a narrow range of frequencies, the momentum density depends on the local displacement gradient, and the stress depends on the local velocity. In these models the momentum density generally…