Exploiting Microstructural Instabilities in Solids and Structures: From Metamaterials to Structural Transitions

By Dennis M. Kochmann, Katia Bertoldi. 2017

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Instabilities in solids and structures are ubiquitous across all length and time scales, and engineering design principles have commonly aimed at preventing instability. However, over the past two decades, engineering mechanics has undergone a paradigm shift, away from avoiding instability and toward taking advantage thereof. At the core of all instabilities—both at the microstructural scale in materials and at the macroscopic, structural level—lies a nonconvex potential energy landscape which is responsible, e.g., for phase transitions and domain switching, localization, pattern formation, or structural buckling and snapping. Deliberately driving a system close to, into, and beyond the unstable regime has been exploited to create new materials systems with superior, interesting, or extreme physical properties. Here, we review the state-of-the-art in utilizing mechanical instabilities in solids and structures at the microstructural level in order to control macroscopic (meta)material performance. After a brief theoretical review, we discuss examples of utilizing material instabilities (from phase transitions and ferroelectric switching to extreme composites) as well as examples of exploiting structural instabilities in acoustic and mechanical metamaterials.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5376a7a61008984b269f67a0be93e3713e5df57

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In Biomedical Engineering

1. Fengwen Wang
2. C. Thomsen
3. Ole Sigmund
4. Jakob S. Jensen
5. N. Olhoff

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Ole Sigmund
2. Fengwen Wang

Citations in the corpus

• Buckling strength topology optimization of 2D periodic materials based on linearized bifurcation analysis (2018, background): “This has resulted in a multitude of exotic materials which offer desirable properties ranging from low density with high strength, stiffness and recoverability [1, 2, 3] to excellent shock absorption capabilities [4, 5], wave-guiding [6], and materials which harness localized instability mechanisms ”