Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

MECHANICAL METAMATERIALS

Design criteria for tough metamaterials

Nature Materials volume 21, pages 272–274 (2022)Cite this article

A generalized strategy to characterize the failure of truss-based microlattices is established, creating a framework for designing tough, damage-tolerant architected materials.

Mechanical metamaterials represent an emerging class of materials whose properties are governed by both their constituents and architectures, enabling the creation of lightweight materials with extreme mechanical properties. However, an understanding and quantification of their tolerance to damage and defects, commonly known as fracture toughness, has remained elusive thus far, partially attributed to the difficulty of manufacturing and characterizing the failure of metamaterials with a sufficiently large number of unit cells1. For almost any structural application, it is often toughness rather than strength or modulus that is the limiting factor in mechanical design. Now, writing in Nature Materials, Angkur Shaikeea and co-workers2 have identified the criteria to evaluate failure in three-dimensional (3D) metamaterials and devised a general framework that can potentially be used to design optimally robust discrete solids.

Your institute does not have access to this article

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Fig. 1: Design strategy for creating tough 3D mechanical metamaterials.

References

  1. Fleck, N. A., Deshpande, V. S. & Ashby, M. F. Proc. R. Soc. A 466, 2495–2516 (2010).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Shaikeea, A. J. D., Cui, H., O’Masta, M., Zheng, X. R. & Deshpande, V. Nat. Mater. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01182-1 (2022).

  3. Zheng, X. et al. Nat. Mater. 15, 1100–1106 (2016).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Bauer, J., Schroer, A., Schwaiger, R. & Kraft, O. Nat. Mater. 15, 438–443 (2016).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Anderson, T. L. Fracture Mechanics: Fundamentals and Applications (CRC Press, 2017).

  6. Nguyen, H. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 117, 14015–14020 (2020).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Jang, D. & Greer, J. R. Nat. Mater. 9, 215–219 (2010).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Schwaiger, R., Meza, L. & Li, X. MRS Bull. 44, 758–765 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Pham, M.-S., Liu, C., Todd, I. & Lertthanasarn, J. Nature 565, 305–311 (2019).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Ashby, M. F. Materials Selection in Mechanical Design 5th edn (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2017).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China

    James Utama Surjadi & Yang Lu

  2. Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China

    James Utama Surjadi & Yang Lu

  3. Nano-Manufacturing Laboratory (NML), Shenzhen Research Institute of City University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China

    Yang Lu

Authors
  1. James Utama Surjadi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Yang Lu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yang Lu.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Surjadi, J.U., Lu, Y. Design criteria for tough metamaterials. Nat. Mater. 21, 272–274 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01193-6

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01193-6

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing