Protective metamaterials

Reducing the prevalence and consequence of injuries by improving protective and biomedical equipment is a core concept of preventative medicine, reducing hospital visits and keeping people active. Mechanical metamaterials, rationally designed structures with combinations of mechanical properties that can’t usually be achieved in their unstructured constituent materials, are being tailored to replace conventional materials used in protective and biomedical equipment. These metamaterials can be adapted to various impact conditions, body types, and user requirements (e.g., performance and comfort). The talk will focus on the challenge of designing and producing such adaptive or tailored systems. The unusual properties and physical risks that will be discussed include i) Negative stiffness/buckling to protect against distributed loads. ii) Negative Poisson’s ratio and force-torque coupling, to adapt between distributed and concentrated loads. iii) Response switching to adapt to impact severity.