“Today’s shapeshifting materials and structures can only transition between a few stable configurations, but we have shown how to create structural materials that have an arbitrary range of shape-morphing capabilities,” said Professor Lakshminarayanan Mahadeva, a renowned expert in the organisation of matter. “These structures allow for independent control of the geometry and mechanics, laying the foundation for engineering functional shapes using a new type of morphable unit cell.”
A major challenge in designing shape-morphing materials is balancing the seemingly contradictory needs of conformability and rigidity. Conformability enables transformation to new shapes, but going too far in this direction compromises the material’s ability to maintain its shape. Rigidity helps lock the material into place, but a very rigid material cannot take on new shapes.
The researchers, from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS...