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Updated: May 30, 2026

Fabricating Metamaterials Using the Fiber Drawing Method
Published on: October 18, 2012
Trusses beyond trusses: intertwined and straw-based metamaterials and beyond
Elias Pescialli1, Junyu Chen1, Konstantinos Karapiperis2
1Mechanics and Materials Laboratory, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
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Periodic beam-based metamaterials have been extensively explored for their tunable stiffness, strength, and wave dispersion. Recent efforts extend this concept by maintaining the lattice topology but replacing beams by more complex structural members-such as straws or intertwined fibers. These mechanical metamaterials leverage underexplored mechanisms from the small-scale design such as contact, friction, and sliding, or multistability and reversible reconfigurability. This provides opportunities for untapped design spaces and performance exploration.
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