Digital Mechanical Metamaterial with Programmable Functionality

Digitization has brought a new era to the world, liberating information from physical media. The material structure-property relation is high-dimensional and nonlinear, and the digitization of structure-property relations may bring unprecedented functional programmability and diversity. Here, a new concept of digital mechanical metamaterial (DMM) is presented, where property design is realized by programming the digital states of the DMM to decouple the design of the structure and property. Transforming the binary stable states of a curved beam to the digital bit, one unit cell of DMM manifests three distinct deformation responses under compression, i.e., compression-twist coupling (CTC), compression-shear coupling (CSC), and pure compression (PC). These deformation modes show notable differences in motion and stiffness, which, by digitally programming a series of DMM, can yield a spectrum of functionalities, including information encryption, stress-strain relation customization, energy absorption in cushioning, effective vibration isolation, and tunable force transmission. This study pioneers a versatile material design paradigm that provides much greater freedom for the property design of intelligent mechanical metamaterials.