Phys.org July 3, 2023
Researchers in the Netherlands have designed irreversible metamaterials that count mechanical driving cycles and store the result into easily interpretable internal states. They extended the designs to aperiodic metamaterials that were sensitive to the order of different driving magnitudes and realized “lock and key” metamaterials that only reach a specific state for a given target driving sequence. The metamaterials were robust, scalable, and extendable, gave insight into the transient memories of complex media, and opened new routes towards smart sensing, soft robotics, and mechanical information processing. Video https://youtu.be/soO2OzbdRzU… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
(a) Schematic representation of the evolution of a “beam counter” metamaterial… Credit: Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 268204, 30 June 2023