Multimaterial Control of Instability in Soft Mechanical Metamaterials

Abstract

Mechanical metamaterials that harness the buckling instability to yield advanced functionalities suggest numerous potential applications, including soft robotics, flexible electronics, and medical implants. Most approaches so far have used geometrical design to adjust the onset of instability in such materials, leading to a relatively narrow range of tunability. The authors investigate an additional dimension, the spatial distribution of material properties, to widen the range of instability thresholds. Adding this further design dimension could extend the instability threshold (critical strain ) by a factor of three, compared to the purely geometrical approach.