Architected materials, also architectured materials and metamaterials, are materials for which the mechanical/physical behavior is controlled by geometric features beyond those of the material microstructure.  Regular architected materials are formed by a periodic tessellation of lattice or unit cells optimized for a specific behavior.  Examples include auxetic materials that exhibit a negative Poisson’s ratio and multistable metamaterials for energy absorption.

Or lab is interested in the interplay between the nonlinear behavior of geometry and the nonlinear inelastic and stimuli-responsive behaviors of constituent materials.

Our research aims are:

• Develop experimentally validated computational models to predict the inelastic and dissipative properties of architected materials and the performance of stimuli-responsive architected materials.
• Develop a design framework for inelastic and stimuli-responsive architected materials

Figure 1: (a) Finite element simulations of an LCE metamaterial, composed an array of bistable LCE beams constrained by rigid horizontal supports, under compression.  The viscoelastic LCE beams buckle non uniformly, the layers to collapse sequential.  When each layer buckles the other layers recovers before bundling again.  (b) The individual buckling of the layers causes the force displacement curve to exhibit multiple peaks compared to the homogenous buckling case. (c) The difference in the viscous dissipation energy and stored elastic energy between the homogenous and inhomogeneous buckling case for different strain rates and number of layers.   The cycle of compression and recovery  increases the viscous dissipation energy which increases the total energy absorption.