Stanford
Zhao Lab

Active Metamaterials and Structures

Metamaterials consist of specifically designed periodic patterns, showing tailorable mechanical, acoustic, optical, or electromagnetic properties. Reconfigurable metamaterials, also called active metamaterials, possess actively tunable patterns and/or physical properties, facilitating more versatile and programmable use.

Physics-aware differentiable design of magnetically actuated kirigami for shape morphing, Nature Communications (2023)

This study introduces a differentiable inverse design framework that considers the physical interplay between geometry, materials, and stimuli of active kirigami, made by soft material embedded with magnetic particles, to realize target shape-morphing upon magnetic excitation

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Magneto-Mechanical Bilayer Metamaterial with Global Area-Preserving Density Tunability for Acoustic Wave Regulation, Advanced Materials (2023)

The bilayer design strategy enables shape reconfiguration with area preservation, which can be further exploited in acoustic applications, including highly tunable bandgaps and waveguides

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4D Printing of Freestanding Liquid Crystal Elastomers via Hybrid Additive Manufacturing, Advanced Materials (2022)

A hybrid 4D printing method is reported to fabricate freestanding liquid crystal elastomers “on-the-fly” by using laser-assisted direct ink writing integrated with digital light processing

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Deep Learning-Accelerated Designs of Tunable Magneto- Mechanical Metamaterials, Applied Materials & Interfaces (2022)

We develop an inverse design framework where a deep residual network replaces the conventional finite-element analysis for acceleration, realizing metamaterials with predetermined global strains under magnetic actuations

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Magnetically Actuated Reconfigurable Metamaterials as Conformal Electromagnetic Filters, Advanced Intelligent Systems (2022)

Structurally reconfigurable electromagnetic metamaterials are developed based on magnetically responsive lattices, switching between accepting and rejecting an incident wave

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Magneto-Mechanical Metamaterials with Widely Tunable Mechanical Properties and Acoustic Bandgaps, Advanced Functional Materials (2021)

A new magneto-mechanical metamaterial permits great shape and multi-physical property tunability through a novel concept of deformation mode branching

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Magnetic Multimaterial Printing for Multimodal Shape Transformation with Tunable Properties and Shiftable Mechanical Behaviors, Applied Materials & Interfaces (2020)

Multimaterial printing enables integration of magnetic soft materials and magnetic shape memory polymers to explore their enhanced multimodal shape transformation and tunable properties

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Symmetry-breaking actuation mechanism for soft robotics and active metamaterials, Applied Materials & Interfaces (2019)

A mechanics-guided mechanism for multimodal deformation is demonstrated, which enables magnetically active metamaterial for tunable mechanical properties

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