Bioinspired Flexible and Programmable Negative Stiffness Mechanical Metamaterials

Energy-absorbing materials are widely used under certain high-frequency scenarios, such as cargo packaging or sport protection. Though negative stiffness mechanical metamaterials have many distinctive advantages, fairly low strength and poor specific energy absorption unfortunately limit their present industrial applications. Inspired by the excellent cushioning performance of paw pads mammals, a novel flexible energy-absorbing metamaterial is proposed herein. Results show that presented outperforms traditional with respect to cushion performance. Moreover, programming strategy achieve multistage tuning between large high rebound properties.