Emergent reconfigurable mechanical metamaterial tessellations with an exponentially large number of discrete configurations

Metamaterials are a class of engineered materials that often violate the routine assumptions that apply to ordinary materials.While metamaterials are typically assembled ut solution gel for cats from carefully designed mesoscale units, the intended bulk-scale functionality can be obscured by unintended emergent effects driven by non-additive unit-unit interactions.These interactions are often sensitive to the number of units and their overall arrangement, making them extrinsic to the unit-scale design.As such, the emergence of extrinsic effects adds a significant hurdle for the development of general-purpose metamaterial technologies.Here, we reconceptualize bulk-scale extrinsic properties as a design opportunity and develop an approach that repurposes them in a new class of exponentially reconfigurable origami-inspired mechanical metamaterials.

We illustrate the use of extrinsic properties to design alarecre.com a single general-purpose structure that can be transformed into a variety of passive mechanical devices including a waveguide, a wave lens, and a wave cloak.Bench-top experiments validate the core concepts of our approach and show how unintentional extrinsic effects become useful for applications of reconfigurable metamaterials.

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