Decoupling local mechanics from large-scale structure in modular metamaterials

A defining feature of mechanical metamaterials is that their properties are determined by the organization of internal structure instead of the raw fabrication materials. This shift of attention to engineering internal degrees of freedom has coaxed relatively simple materials into exhibiting a wide...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 114; no. 14; pp. 3590 - 3595
Main Authors Yang, Nan, Silverberg, Jesse L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 04.04.2017
Subjects
Deformation
Engineering
Mechanical properties
Physical Sciences
Topology
mechanical metamaterials
forward design
inverse design
modular origami
kirigami
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Summary:A defining feature of mechanical metamaterials is that their properties are determined by the organization of internal structure instead of the raw fabrication materials. This shift of attention to engineering internal degrees of freedom has coaxed relatively simple materials into exhibiting a wide range of remarkable mechanical properties. For practical applications to be realized, however, this nascent understanding of metamaterial design must be translated into a capacity for engineering large-scale structures with prescribed mechanical functionality. Thus, the challenge is to systematically map desired functionality of largescale structures backward into a design scheme while using finite parameter domains. Such “inverse design” is often complicated by the deep coupling between large-scale structure and local mechanical function, which limits the available design space. Here, we introduce a design strategy for constructing 1D, 2D, and 3D mechanical metamaterials inspired by modular origami and kirigami. Our approach is to assemble a number of modules into a voxelized large-scale structure, where the module’s design has a greater number of mechanical design parameters than the number of constraints imposed by bulk assembly. This inequality allows each voxel in the bulk structure to be uniquely assigned mechanical properties independent from its ability to connect and deform with its neighbors. In studying specific examples of large-scale metamaterial structures we show that a decoupling of global structure from local mechanical function allows for a variety of mechanically and topologically complex designs.
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Edited by David A. Weitz, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved February 21, 2017 (received for review December 16, 2016)
1N.Y. and J.L.S. contributed equally to this work.
Author contributions: N.Y. and J.L.S. designed research; N.Y. performed research; N.Y. and J.L.S. analyzed data; N.Y. and J.L.S. wrote the paper; and J.L.S. supervised the research.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1620714114