Elasticity and Stability of Shape Changing Structures

TL;DR

This paper reviews how elastic instabilities like buckling and wrinkling enable the design of shape-shifting structures and metamaterials, connecting fundamental mechanics to advanced applications in programmable matter.

Contribution

It synthesizes recent advances linking elastic instabilities to functional shape-changing structures and metamaterials, highlighting new design principles.

Findings

Elastic instabilities enable programmable shape change.

Mechanisms like buckling and wrinkling are harnessed in metamaterials.

Shape-shifting structures are achieved through controlled elastic instabilities.

Abstract

As we enter the age of designer matter - where objects can morph and change shape on command - what tools do we need to create shape-shifting structures? At the heart of an elastic deformation is the combination of dilation and distortion, or stretching and bending. The competition between the latter can cause elastic instabilities, and over the last fifteen years these instabilities have provided a multitude of ways to prescribe and control shape change. Buckling, wrinkling, folding, creasing, snapping have become mechanisms that when harmoniously combined enable mechanical metamaterials, self-folding origami, ultralight and ultrathin kirigami, and structures that appear to grow from one shape to another. In this review, I aim to connect the fundamentals of elastic instabilities to the advanced functionality currently found within mechanical metamaterials.