Sustainable Architected Metamaterials for Elastic Wave Manipulation

The advancement of additive manufacturing techniques has significantly expanded the design space for mechanical and elastic metamaterials, enabling the construction of complex architected structures with hierarchical building. This has opened new avenues for creating artificial and bio-inspired materials, known as metamaterials, with special mechanical properties, such as high recoverability under compression and super-elastic tensile behavior. In the field of piezoelectric materials, architected metamaterials have gained considerable attention due to their ability to exhibit enhanced and customizable electromechanical properties through careful design of the internal structure and arrangement of piezoelectric elements at the micro/nanoscale. These advancements pave the way for a new generation of piezoelectric devices with improved electro-mechanical capabilities for sensors, energy harvesters, and transducers.
The objective of this doctoral project is to develop a design framework for sustainable active three- dimensional piezoelectric metamaterials aimed at manipulating acoustic and elastic waves in higher dimensions. First, the construction of these piezoelectric metamaterials will begin by establishing an engineering design strategy based on 3D strut-based unit cells, each equipped with precisely designed electric displacement maps. These unit cells will be tessellated in 3D to create the metamaterial with tailored piezoelectric anisotropy, enabling a customizable piezoelectric coefficient tensor. Secondly, in terms of the metamaterial’s elasto-dynamic behavior, the project aims to gain a
thorough understanding of the dynamic behavior of the piezoelectric lattice. This will involve characterizing the elastic wave dispersion through the calculation of the band structure.
Subsequently, the focus will shift to developing tools to explore Willis coupling and electro-momentum coupling phenomena, and their influence on wave propagation in these architected metamaterials. Finally, we will target specific functionalities such as defect or impact sensing, directional wave detection, energy harvesting, and exploring non-Hermitian behavior.

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