Abstract

Elastic instabilities have been leveraged in soft metamaterials to attain novel functionalities such as mechanical memory and sequential pathways. Pathways have been realized in complex media or within a collection of hysteretic elements. However, much less has been explored in frustrated and partitioned soft metamaterials. In this work, we introduce spatial partitioning as a method to localize deformation in sub-regions of a large and soft metamaterial. The partitioning is achieved through the strategic arrangement of soft inclusions in a soft lattice, which form distinct regions behaving as mechanical units. We examine two partitions: an equally spaced layer partition with mechanical units connected in series, and a cross partition, represented by interconnected series of mechanical units in parallel. Sequential pathways are obtained by frustrating the partitioned metamaterial post-manufacture and are characterized by tracking the polarization change in each partition region. Through a combination of experiments and simulations, we demonstrate that partitioning enables tuning the pathway from longitudinal with weak interactions to a pathway exhibiting strong interactions rising from geometric incompatibility and central domain rotation. We show that tuning the level of uniform lateral pre-strain provides a wide range of tunability from disabling to modifying the sequential pathway. We also show that imposing a nonuniform confinement and altering the tilting of one or two of the domain edges enables to program the pathway, access a larger set of states, and tune the level of interaction between the regions.

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