Geared Topological Metamaterials with Tunable Mechanical Stability

Geared Topological Metamaterials with Tunable Mechanical Stability

The classification of materials into insulators and conductors has been shaken up by the discovery of topological insulators that conduct robustly at the edge but not in the bulk. In mechanics, designating a material as insulating or conducting amounts to asking if it is rigid or floppy. Although mechanical structures that display topological floppy modes have been proposed, they are all vulner...

Transformable topological mechanical metamaterials

Mechanical metamaterials are engineered materials whose structures give them novel mechanical properties, including negative Poisson's ratios, negative compressibilities and phononic bandgaps. Of particular interest are systems near the point of mechanical instability, which recently have been shown to distribute force and motion in robust ways determined by a nontrivial topological state. Here...

Lightweight Mechanical Metamaterials with Tunable Negative Thermal Expansion.

Ice floating on water is a great manifestation of negative thermal expansion (NTE) in nature. The limited examples of natural materials possessing NTE have stimulated research on engineered structures. Previous studies on NTE structures were mostly focused on theoretical design with limited experimental demonstration in two-dimensional planar geometries. In this work, aided with multimaterial p...

Metamaterials with Tunable Nonlinearity

Tunable Photonic Metamaterials