Abstract
The properties of conventional materials result from the arrangement of and the interaction between atoms at the nanoscale. Metamaterials have shifted this paradigm by offering property control through structural design at the mesoscale, thus broadening the design space beyond the limits of traditional materials. A family of mechanical metamaterials consisting of soft sheets featuring a patterned array of reconfigurable bistable domes is reported here. The domes in this metamaterial architecture can be reversibly inverted at the local scale to generate programmable multistable shapes and tunable mechanical responses at the global scale. By 3D printing a robotic gripper with energy‐storing skin and a structure that can memorize and compute spatially‐distributed mechanical signals, it is shown that these metamaterials are an attractive platform for novel mechanologic concepts and open new design opportunities for structures used in robotics, architecture, and biomedical applications.
Highlights
Introduction morphing elements in architectureIn particular, multistability in metamaterials allows for programming both static and Mechanical metamaterials exploit geometrical arrangements to dynamic properties, such as stiffness adaptation,[6,38] tunable manipulate the deflections, stresses, and strain energy of build- bandgaps,[39,40] and quantum valley Hall effect.[41]ing blocks to generate unconventional mechanical properties atThe ability to generate multiple stable states is the larger macroscale
To enable programmability of such systems, we study the effect of the geometry of the domes on the global curvature of exemplary strips (Figure 2a,b)
Dome-patterned sheets can be designed to display an extraordinary range of mechanical properties, shaping capabilities, and in-memory mechanologic effects that are reversibly programmed within the metamaterial architecture
Summary
The energetics involved during inversion of an individual dome were investigated through finite element (FE) simulations and experiments on 3D printed soft domes with controlled height and thickness (Figure S1a,b, Supporting Information). Our experiments show that a minimum dome height (hmin) is required to achieve bistability Such minimum height was found to scale linearly with the thickness of the dome (t) (Figure S1c, Supporting Information). For sufficiently small dome heights (h < 6 mm for r = 8 mm), the experiments indicate a linear dependence of the global strip curvature on the dome height This linear scaling is effectively quantified by FE simulations (Figure 2c and Figure S2, Supporting Information). This work differential is stored as pre-stress, which results in the bending of the strips (Figures S3, Supporting Information) This model effectively captures the linear dependence of the strip curvature on the height of the dome and explains why the global geometry is not affected by the strip thickness
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