CEE Seminar Mechanism-based mechanical metamaterials

The design and analysis of mechanism-based mechanical metamaterials is a
relatively new and rapidly growing research area. It studies artificial
"materials" that take advantage of "mechanisms" (that is, nontrivial
energy-free deformations) to achieve interesting macroscopic behavior.
The relevant mechanics is nonlinear, since mechanisms involve large
rotations. While there have been insightful studies of specific
examples, some fundamental issues remain poorly understood. This talk
will address two of them, namely (a) how to analyze a metamaterial's
macroscopic behavior, and (b) whether linear elastic calculations can
still be of use in the analysis of such systems, despite the fact that
their mechanisms involve large rotations? My talk will start with a
broad introduction to this area; then I'll discuss some recent work with
Xuenan Li, which focuses on a particular (very rich) example -- the
Kagome metamaterial. This system is interesting because it has
infinitely many mechanisms, yet it behaves macroscopically as a
nonlinear elastic material whose stress-free states are compressive
conformal maps.