Related papers: Towards active stiffness control in pattern-formin…
Honeycomb microstructures with circular voids are well known to undergo pattern transformations under macroscopic strain loading. Depending on the biaxiality of the applied strain, they deform into three different patterns. Here we…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into mechanical work to produce autonomous motion, and exhibit striking collective dynamics that biology relies on for essential functions. Controlling those dynamics and transport in…
Mechanical metamaterials can be designed to exhibit unique mechanical properties, including tunable auxetic behavior as well as multi-stability, which arise from the geometry and configuration of the constituent building blocks.…
Mechanical metamaterials are artificially engineered microstructures that exhibit novel mechanical behavior on the macroscopic scale. Active metamaterials can be externally controlled. Pneumatically actuated metamaterials can change their…
Mechanical metamaterials are periodic lattice structures with complex unit cell architectures that can achieve extraordinary mechanical properties beyond the capability of bulk materials. A new class of metamaterials is proposed, whose…
The design of desired behaviors in mechanical metamaterials has produced remarkable advances but has generally neglected two aspects - the inevitable presence of undesired behaviors and the role of dynamics in avoiding such behaviors.…
Spatio-temporal patterns emerging from an initial quiescent, uniform state is a phenomenon observed in many dynamical systems sustained far from thermodynamic equilibrium, the practical application of which has only recently begun to be…
Architected metamaterials like foams and lattices exhibit complex responses governed by microstructural instabilities, localization, and phase-transition-like phenomena. Their behavior is further affected by heterogeneities inherent in…
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…
Coupling between flows and material properties imbues rheological matter with its wide-ranging applicability, hence the excitement for harnessing the rheology of active fluids for which internal structure and continuous energy injection…
The paper investigates localized deformation patterns resulting from the onset of instabilities in lattice structures. The study is motivated by previous observations on discrete hexagonal lattices, where the onset of non-uniform,…
Architected materials achieve unique mechanical properties through precisely engineered microstructures that minimize material usage. However, a key challenge of low-density materials is balancing high stiffness with stable deformability up…
Advances in manufacturing techniques may now realize virtually any imaginable microstructures, paving the way for architected materials with properties beyond those found in nature. This has lead to a quest for closing gaps in…
Active stresses in biological cells and tissues drive many developmental processes. However, increasing experimental evidence suggests that additional mechanical interactions with surrounding material can play a crucial role in guiding…
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…
In active matter systems, deformable boundaries provide a mechanism to organize internal active stresses and perform work on the external environment. To study a minimal model of such a system, we perform particle-based simulations of an…
The interplay between active matter and its environment is central to understanding emergent behavior in biological and synthetic systems. Here, we show that coupling active nematic flows to small-amplitude deformations of a compliant…
This study examines the mechanical behavior of a novel class of mechanical metamaterials alternating pentamode lattices and stiffening plates. The unit cell of such lattices consists of a sub-lattice of the face cubic-centered unit cell…