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MECHANICAL METAMATERIALS

Design criteria for tough metamaterials

Nature Materials volume 21, pages 272–274 (2022)Cite this article

A generalized strategy to characterize the failure of truss-based microlattices is established, creating a framework for designing tough, damage-tolerant architected materials.

Mechanical metamaterials represent an emerging class of materials whose properties are governed by both their constituents and architectures, enabling the creation of lightweight materials with extreme mechanical properties. However, an understanding and quantification of their tolerance to damage and defects, commonly known as fracture toughness, has remained elusive thus far, partially attributed to the difficulty of manufacturing and characterizing the failure of metamaterials with a sufficiently large number of unit cells1. For almost any structural application, it is often toughness rather than strength or modulus that is the limiting factor in mechanical design. Now, writing in Nature Materials, Angkur Shaikeea and co-workers2 have identified the criteria to evaluate failure in three-dimensional (3D) metamaterials and devised a general framework that can potentially be used to design optimally robust discrete solids.

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Fig. 1: Design strategy for creating tough 3D mechanical metamaterials.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China

    James Utama Surjadi & Yang Lu

  2. Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China

    James Utama Surjadi & Yang Lu

  3. Nano-Manufacturing Laboratory (NML), Shenzhen Research Institute of City University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China

    Yang Lu

Authors
  1. James Utama Surjadi
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  2. Yang Lu
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Correspondence to Yang Lu.

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Surjadi, J.U., Lu, Y. Design criteria for tough metamaterials. Nat. Mater. 21, 272–274 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01193-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01193-6

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