Metamaterial unit-cell with Dual-Properties enabled by Instabilities

Master Thesis (2025)
Author(s)

D.O. Roebroek (TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering)

Contributor(s)

D. Farhadi Farhadi – Mentor (TU Delft - Mechatronic Systems Design)

M.A. ten Wolde – Mentor (TU Delft - Mechatronic Systems Design)

Faculty
Mechanical Engineering
More Info
expand_more
Publication Year
2025
Language
English
Graduation Date
27-06-2025
Awarding Institution
Delft University of Technology
Programme
['Mechanical Engineering']
Faculty
Mechanical Engineering
Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Abstract

Metamaterials have extraordinary properties due to their designed structure rather than their
constituent materials. Increasingly, metamaterials are formed that demonstrate reprogrammable
properties; here, a property can be altered using a conditional input, separate from the deformation
input, to access the property. To achieve materialised control for the reprogramming of
properties and to subsequently simplify the use of a metamaterial, we harnessed mechanical instabilities, firstly, to memorise deformation history, and secondly, to dictate deformation output.
Metamaterials based on our unit-cell can adapt to deformation input and process this information
without requiring active control. This paper presents a tunable design of a metamaterial
unit-cell with dual-property deformation behaviour for which an axial strain is used as the input
to access its output deformation, as well as the input to switch between modes. Characteristics
of the mechanism are analysed using simulations and are validated with experiments. Applications
exploiting features of the unit-cell are explored in reprogrammable material properties and
materialised computation.

Files

License info not available
warning

File under embargo until 27-06-2026