Recently, the latest research findings by Associate Professor Pan Fei, Professor Chen Yuli and Academician Xiang Jinwu from the School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering, titled “On-demand Reprogrammable Mechanical Metamaterial Driven by Structure Performance Relations,” have been published in Advanced Materials. The article was selected as an Editor's Choice by the journal and was specially recommended.

Wei Yuling, a doctoral candidate from the School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering, is the first author of the paper, while Associate Professor Pan Fei and Professor Chen Yuli are the co-corresponding authors. Beihang University is the primary affiliation for the study.

With the development of artificial intelligence, mechanical reprogrammability of multifunctional and self-adaptive materials or structures plays an important role in the embodied agent of intelligent systems, and has been recognized as a new route to boost numerous frontier fields. To realize the on-demand tuning of material performance, materials are envisioned to be capable of reprogramming their performances precisely and rapidly by digital interfaces, to meet the target demands in response to human commands or environment changes. This poses an urgent requirement for the paradigm shift of materials design.

Mechanical metamaterial automatically reprogrammed according to the target stress–strain curve

There are two key challenges to achieve precise and rapid mechanical reprogramming for varying targets through the integration of physical and digital merits. First, in the physical part, the structure-actuation integration for rapid and broad range performance tunability has been less explored. Second, in the digital part, the high-dimensional structure-performance relations of the metamaterials, which are critical for precisely guiding on-demand reprogramming toward varying targets, are less considered.

In the study, the researchers report a rapidly and on-demand reprogrammable mechanical metamaterial embedded with a digital interface to its structure-performance relations. The metamaterial consists of periodically tessellated bistable building blocks, which has rich spatial heterogeneity for mechanical reprogramming. Guided by the pre-established structure-performance relations, the metamaterial can alter its mechanical response to match different targets by fast switching building blocks’ states with built-in soft actuators. Furthermore, it shows highly tunable tensile, compressive, shearing, and bending mechanical performances. 

This work showcases integration of physical and digital tunability, enabling excellent performance and fast reprogrammability for multifunctional and self-adaptive systems. It is expected to be applied to multifunctional and adaptive physical systems in numerous fields such as intelligent aircraft and robots.

The work receives support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Key Research and Development Program of China, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

Original article link: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202410865

Editor: Lyu Xingyun