Combinatorial design of textured mechanical metamaterials

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Mechanical Engineering
• Robotics

Background:

• Metamaterial design typically uses periodic architectures, resulting in homogeneous properties.
• Advanced applications require spatially textured mechanical functionality, necessitating aperiodic architectures.
• Naive aperiodic designs often suffer from geometrical frustration, hindering performance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a combinatorial strategy for designing aperiodic, frustration-free mechanical metamaterials.
• To enable spatially textured mechanical functionalities for advanced applications.
• To explore novel order and machine-like functionalities in metamaterials.

Main Methods:

• Utilized cubic building blocks (voxels) with anisotropic deformation.
• Implemented a local stacking rule ensuring cooperative shape changes and seamless fitting.
• Employed three-dimensional printing for fabrication.
• Leveraged a combinatorial design strategy.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated frustration-free aperiodic metamaterials with spatially textured functionalities.
• Observed long-range holographic order, linking surface texture to internal voxel arrangement.
• Showcased programmable shape-shifting capabilities under uniaxial compression.
• Revealed sensing and pattern analysis abilities through mechanical response to textured surfaces.

Conclusions:

• Combinatorial design offers a new pathway for creating advanced mechanical metamaterials.
• The developed metamaterials exhibit unusual order and machine-like functionalities.
• This approach overcomes limitations of geometrical frustration in complex aperiodic structures.