Related papers: Morpho-plastic cellular metamaterials
Architected metamaterials such as foams and lattices exhibit a wide range of properties governed by microstructural instabilities and emerging phase transformations. Their macroscopic response--including energy dissipation during impact,…
The increasing demands of sustainable energy, electronics, and biomedical applications call for next-generation functional materials with unprecedented properties. Of particular interest are emerging materials that display exceptional…
We present a new algorithm to design lightweight cellular materials with required properties in a multi-physics context. In particular, we focus on a thermo-mechanical setting, by promoting the design of unit cells characterized both by an…
We introduce a compact yet highly expressive design space for shellular metamaterials. By employing only a few dozen degrees of freedom, this design space represents geometries ranging from simple planar configurations to complex triply…
Using interplay between surface plasmons and metamaterials, we propose a new technique for novel metamaterial designs. We show that surface plasmons existing on thin metal surfaces can be used to "drive" non-resonant structures in their…
Hyperuniform materials, characterized by their suppressed density fluctuations and vanishing structure factors as the wave number approaches zero, represent a unique state of matter that straddles the boundary between order and randomness.…
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…
During the development of an organism, cells must coordinate and organize to generate the correct shape, structure, and spatial patterns of tissues and organs, a process known as morphogenesis. The morphogenesis of embryonic tissues is…
Soft membranes are commonly employed in shape-morphing applications, where the material is programmed to achieve a target shape upon activation by an external trigger, and as coating layers that alter the surface characteristics of bulk…
Optical metamaterials have the potential to control the flow of light at will which may lead to spectacular applications as the perfect lens or the cloaking device. Both of these optical elements require invariant effective material…
Tissue-like materials are required in many robotic systems to improve human-machine interactions. However, the mechanical properties of living tissues are difficult to replicate. Synthetic materials are not usually capable of simultaneously…
The hydrodynamic theory of active nematics has been often used to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell flows and motile topological defects within soft confluent tissues. Those theories, however, often rely on the assumption that…
Topology optimization is a powerful tool utilized in various fields for structural design. However, its application has primarily been restricted to static or passively moving objects, mainly focusing on hard materials with limited…
Metamaterials are being used to model various exotic "optical spaces" for such applications as novel lenses and cloaking. While most effort is directed towards engineering of continuously changing dielectric permittivity and magnetic…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
Mechanical metamaterials -- structures with unusual properties that emerge from their internal architecture -- that are designed to undergo large deformations typically exploit large internal rotations, and therefore, necessitate the…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
Developing soft robots that can control their own life-cycle and degrade on-demand while maintaining hyper-elasticity is a significant research challenge. On-demand degradable soft robots, which conserve their original functionality during…
The present study proposes the use of intelligent metasurfaces in the design of products, as enforcers of circular economy principles. Intelligent metasurfaces can tune their physical properties (electromagnetic, acoustic, mechanical) by…
Transformation optics offers an unconventional approach to the control of electromagnetic fields. A transformation optical structure is designed by first applying a form-invariant coordinate transform to Maxwell's equations, in which part…