Science Daily December 2, 2020
Metamaterials’ properties are controlled through structural design at the mesoscale, thus broadening the design space beyond the limits of traditional materials. An international team of researchers (USA – Purdue University, Switzerland) experimented with a family of mechanical metamaterials consisting of soft sheets and patterned array of reconfigurable bistable domes. The domes 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, they have 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…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Design of dome‐patterned metamaterial sheets featuring complex shapes, memory effects, programmable mechanical response, and muscle‐free actuation. Credit: Advanced Science