Mechanical metamaterials exhibit properties and functionalities that cannot be realized in conventional materials. Originally, the field focused on achieving unusual (zero or negative) values for familiar mechanical parameters, such as density, Poisson's ratio or compressibility, but more recently, new classes of metamaterials — including shape-morphing, topological and nonlinear metamaterials — have emerged. These materials exhibit exotic functionalities, such as pattern and shape transformations in response to mechanical forces, unidirectional guiding of motion and waves, and reprogrammable stiffness or dissipation. In this Review, we identify the design principles leading to these properties and discuss, in particular, linear and mechanism-based metamaterials (such as origami-based and kirigami-based metamaterials), metamaterials harnessing instabilities and frustration, and topological metamaterials. We conclude by outlining future challenges for the design, creation and conceptualization of advanced mechanical metamaterials.

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Flexible mechanical metamaterials

Mechanical metamaterials associated with stiffness, rigidity and compressibility: a brief review

Exciting advancements have been made in the field of flexible electronic devices in the last two decades and will certainly lead to a revolution in peoples’ lives in the future. However, because of the poor sustainability of the active materials in complex stress environments, new requirements have been adopted for the construction of flexible devices. Thus, hierarchical architectures in natural materials, which have developed various environment-adapted structures and materials through natural selection, can serve as guides to solve the limitations of materials and engineering techniques. This review covers the smart designs of structural materials inspired by natural materials and their utility in the construction of flexible devices. First, we summarize structural materials that accommodate mechanical deformations, which is the fundamental requirement for flexible devices to work properly in complex environments. Second, we discuss the functionalities of flexible devices induced by nature-inspired stru...

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Nature-Inspired Structural Materials for Flexible Electronic Devices

Mechanical Metamaterials and Their Engineering Applications

Artificial muscles hold promise for safe and powerful actuation for myriad common machines and robots. However, the design, fabrication, and implementation of artificial muscles are often limited by their material costs, operating principle, scalability, and single-degree-of-freedom contractile actuation motions. Here we propose an architecture for fluid-driven origami-inspired artificial muscles. This concept requires only a compressible skeleton, a flexible skin, and a fluid medium. A mechanical model is developed to explain the interaction of the three components. A fabrication method is introduced to rapidly manufacture low-cost artificial muscles using various materials and at multiple scales. The artificial muscles can be programed to achieve multiaxial motions including contraction, bending, and torsion. These motions can be aggregated into systems with multiple degrees of freedom, which are able to produce controllable motions at different rates. Our artificial muscles can be driven by fluids at negative pressures (relative to ambient). This feature makes actuation safer than most other fluidic artificial muscles that operate with positive pressures. Experiments reveal that these muscles can contract over 90% of their initial lengths, generate stresses of ∼600 kPa, and produce peak power densities over 2 kW/kg-all equal to, or in excess of, natural muscle. This architecture for artificial muscles opens the door to rapid design and low-cost fabrication of actuation systems for numerous applications at multiple scales, ranging from miniature medical devices to wearable robotic exoskeletons to large deployable structures for space exploration.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/114/50/13132.full.pdf

Fluid-driven origami-inspired artificial muscles

Reconfigurable devices, whose shape can be drastically altered, are central to expandable shelters, deployable space structures, reversible encapsulation systems and medical tools and robots. All these applications require structures whose shape can be actively controlled, both for deployment and to conform to the surrounding environment. While most current reconfigurable designs are application specific, here we present a mechanical metamaterial with tunable shape, volume and stiffness. Our approach exploits a simple modular origami-like design consisting of rigid faces and hinges, which are connected to form a periodic structure consisting of extruded cubes. We show both analytically and experimentally that the transformable metamaterial has three degrees of freedom, which can be actively deformed into numerous specific shapes through embedded actuation. The proposed metamaterial can be used to realize transformable structures with arbitrary architectures, highlighting a robust strategy for the design of reconfigurable devices over a wide range of length scales.

/pdf/a-three-dimensional-actuated-origami-inspired-transformable-5e2n37oesf.pdf

Twan A. de Jong

Papers

A three-dimensional actuated origami-inspired transformable metamaterial with multiple degrees of freedom