Over the past few years, exciting progress has been made in the field of mechanical metamaterials. Harnessing nonlinear degrees of freedom arising in suitably designed microstructures, metamaterials could be programmed with specific mechanical tasks, such as negative stiffness, elastic hysteresis or programmable mechanics (1-4). So far, most of these developments have been made with passive-at equilibrium-materials. .
The goal of this project is generalize these findings to create a new class of programmable, dynamical and active materials, called Machine Materials. To do this, the idea is to set the grounds of nonlinear osmomechanics, which combines swelling and nonlinear elasticity within metagels, i.e. architected hydrogels under osmotic shock.
References:
- Florijn, Coulais, van Hecke, Programmable Mechanical Metamaterials. Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 175503 (2014)
- Coulais, Overvelde, Lubbers, Bertoldi and van Hecke, Discontinuous Buckling of Wide Beams and Metabeams. Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 044301 (2015)
- Coulais, Teomy, de Reus, Shokef and van Hecke, Combinatorial Design of Textured Mechanical Metamaterials. Nature 535, 529-532 (2016)
- Coulais, Sounas, and Alù, Static Non-Reciprocity in Mechanical Metamaterials. Nature, 542, 461-464 (2017)
Supervisor: Corentin Coulais
More info: c.coulais@uva.nl
Project type: Bachelor or Master
