mechanical metamaterials

Call for Abstracts
We invite submissions for Topic 1-1: Mechanical Metamaterials at ASME IMECE 2025, to be held in Memphis, Tennessee.

https://imece.secure-platform.com/a/page/track_list

We have developed a mechanical transistor that synergizes a Kirigami thermomechanical sensor and a bistable actuator, enabling in-memory computing for combinational and sequential logic.

Our mechanical computing device stands out by employing modular construction, symmetry breaking, nonlinear materials, crafting logic gates and memory units responding to environmental stimuli through thermal delay.

Online - Advanced Functional Materials 

Open Post-Doc Position in Italy at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia on Auxetic Metamaterials (UPDATE)

S-Lab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University is opening one Ph.D. position for “mechanical metamaterials.”  The applicants should have a master’s degree by August 2024.

Send an application package (Letter of Intent and CV) to jaehyung.ju [at] sjtu.edu.cn (jaehyung[dot]ju[at]sjtu[dot]edu[dot]cn) before 12/6, 2023.

Like Poisson’s effect, mechanical coupling is a directional indirect response by a directional input loading. With the advance in manufacturing techniques of 3D complex geometry, architected materials with unit cells of finite volume rather than a point yield more degrees of freedom and foster exotic mechanical couplings such as axial–shear, axial–rotation, axial–bending, and axial–twisting.

We developed a method enabling a single material system to transform with untethered, reversible, low-powered reprogrammable deformations and shape locking via the application of magneto-thermomechanically triggered prestress on the Shape Memory Polymers (SMPs) and structural instability with asymmetric magnetic torque. The mutual assistance of two physics concepts—magnetic control combined with the thermomechanical behavior of SMPs is demonstrated, without requiring new materials synthesis and high-power energy for reprogramming.

We developed an inverse design method for constructing 3D reconfigurable architected structures — we synthesized modular origami structures whose unit cells can be volumetrically mapped into a prescribed 3D curvilinear shape followed by volumetric shrinkage for constructing modules. After modification of tubular geometry, we searched modular origamis’ geometry and topology for target mobility using a topological reconstruction of modules.

A bistable curved beam with magnetic torque-driven actuation has the potential for fast and untethered reconfiguration of metamaterials. However, no modeling method of a bistable curved beam whose instability is coupled with an external magnetic field for the design of active metamaterials. A bistable curved beam's second mode (S-shape) generation is essential for a multimodal and multistep reconfiguration of metamaterials, which was not explored before.

Meng, Z., Liu, M., Yan, H., Genin, G. M., & Chen, C. Q.* (2022). Deployable mechanical metamaterials with multistep programmable transformation. Science Advances, 8(23), eabn5460.