Mechanical signaling cascades

TL;DR

This paper explores how mechanical signals can propagate in bistable cascades within metamaterials, identifying conditions for uphill signal transmission and validating findings through experiments on soft elastomers.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a penetration length for mechanical perturbations, enabling uphill signal propagation in bistable cascades, supported by theoretical and experimental analysis.

Findings

Signals can propagate uphill in energy within finite distances.

A penetration length for perturbations is identified.

Experimental results on soft elastomers confirm the theoretical predictions.

Abstract

Mechanical computing has seen resurgent interest recently owing to the potential to embed sensing and computation into new classes of programmable metamaterials. To realize this, however, one must push signals from one part of a device to another, and do so in a way that can be reset robustly. We investigate the propagation of signals in a bistable mechanical cascade uphill in energy. By identifying a penetration length for perturbations, we show that signals can propagate uphill for finite distances and map out parameters for this to occur. Experiments on soft elastomers corroborate our results.