Design framework for programmable three-dimensional woven metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric design framework for 3D woven metamaterials that enables highly tunable mechanical properties, including anisotropic stiffness, stretchability, and programmable failure patterns.

Contribution

The authors develop a graph-based design framework for woven lattices, facilitating the creation of complex, tunable, and heterogeneous 3D woven metamaterials with programmable properties.

Findings

Achieved over an order of magnitude variation in anisotropic stiffness.

Demonstrated stretchability up to four times original length.

Enabled programmable failure patterns through design tunability.

Abstract

Mechanical metamaterials have continued to offer unprecedented tunability in mechanical properties, but most designs to date have prioritized attaining high stiffness and strength while sacrificing deformability. The emergence of woven lattices-three-dimensional networks of entangled fibers-has introduced a pathway to the largely overlooked compliant and stretchable regime of metamaterials. However, the design and implementation of these complex architectures has remained a primarily manual process, restricting identification and validation of their full achievable design and property space. Here, we present a geometric design framework that encodes woven topology using a graph structure, enabling the creation of woven lattices with tunable architectures, functional gradients, and arbitrary heterogeneity. Through use of microscale in situ tension experiments and computational mechanics models, we reveal highly tunable anisotropic stiffness (varying by over an order of magnitude) and extreme stretchability (up to a stretch of four) within the design space produced by the framework. Moreover, we demonstrate the ability of woven metamaterials to exhibit programmable failure patterns by leveraging tunability in the design process. This framework provides a design and modeling toolbox to access this previously unattainable high-compliance regime of mechanical metamaterials, enabling programmable large-deformation, nonlinear responses.