Nonlinearity beats Damping: A New Class of Soft Active Metamaterials
Abstract
The primary goal of the first four months of this award (which started in April 2017) was to set up this highly collaborative and interdisciplinary research project across the four participating institutions and to coordinate and integrate the individual contributions. As originally proposed, the team has aimed to exploit periodic arrays of multistable mechanical elements to produce controllable nonlinear dynamics including transition and solitary waves for applications in mechanical logic and soft robotics. Going beyond prior research that focused on 1D chains of bistable elements, the first year aims to lay the foundation for higher-dimensional systems whose nonlinear dynamic behavior has remained widely unexplored. To this end, the goals were to establish (1) the theory required to describe nonlinear waves in 2D, (2) new mechanical systems that show nonlinear transition wave phenomena in 2D, (3) new materials systems and fabrication avenues to integrate soft active members into the periodic arrays for actuation and wave control, (4) applications that exploit the principle of instability-induced nonlinear dynamics. These four points were addressed by the teams of, respectively, PIs Kochmann, Bertoldi/Lewis, Jordan and Daraio with collaborations across all teams.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 11, 2018
- Source ID
- W911NF1710147
Entities
People
- Dennis Kochmann
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- California Institute of Technology
- United States Army