Tunable Metamaterials for Impact Mitigation

Abstract Traditional methods of shielding fragile goods and human tissues from impact energy rely on isotropic foam materials. The mechanical properties of these foams are inferior to an emerging class of metamaterials called plate lattices, which have predominantly been fabricated in simple 2.5‐dimensional geometries using conventional methods that constrain the feasible design space. In this work, additive manufacturing is used to relax these constraints and realize plate lattice metamaterials with nontrivial, locally varying geometry. The limitations of traditional computer‐aided design tools are circumvented and allow the simulation of complex buckling and collapse behaviors without a manual meshing step. By validating these simulations against experimental data from tests on fabricated samples, sweeping exploration of the plate lattice design space is enabled. Numerical and experimental tests demonstrate plate lattices absorb up to six times more impact energy at equivalent densities relative to foams and shield objects from impacts ten times more energetic while transmitting equivalent peak stresses. In contrast to previous investigations of plate lattice metamaterials, designs with nonuniform geometric prebuckling in the out‐of‐plane direction is explored and showed that these designs exhibit 10% higher energy absorption efficiency on average and 25% higher in the highest‐performing design.