Polymer-inspired mechanical metamaterials
Abstract
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, whose closely packed frameworks often exhibit a rigid mechanical nature. Here, we present polymer-inspired metamaterials (PIMs) by programming deformation and strengthening mechanisms that mimic the mechanical roles of key constituent elements in polymer networks. By combining metamaterial programmability with polymer-inspired structures, we design crosslinking, proto-crystalline order, and entanglement in PIMs to enable macroscale strengthening mechanisms inspired by crosslink, molecular-density, and pre-stretch strengthening in polymers, expanding the metamaterial structure-property design space. This macroscale polymer-inspired programmability also suggests that PIMs could serve as a design platform incorporating the programmability strategies to achieve desired deformation and strengthening responses, holding a potential for applications in soft robotic joints and compliant connectors.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.16732,
title = {Polymer-inspired mechanical metamaterials},
author = {Zhenyang Gao and Pengyuan Ren and Yifeng Dong and Gengchen Zheng and Min-Son Pham and Xiao Shang and Shaojia Wang and Shuo Yang and Zijue Tang and Yongbing Li and Hua Sun and Yi Wua and Hongjian Jiang and Lan Zhang and Tobin Filleter and Lingyu Kong and Kun Zhou and Haowei Wanga and Yang Lu and Yu Zou and Hongze Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.16732},
year = {2026}
}