CAREER: Harnessing Phase Behavior for Mechanical Metamaterials

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award will advance the fundamental understanding of multifunctional mechanical metamaterials. The mechanical responses of metamaterials arise from their precisely designed geometry. Over the past two decades, extensive efforts have leveraged this principle to engineer remarkable responses to mechanical loads and external stimuli, including ultrastiff structures, programmable deformation, and tunable shape change. However, existing modeling approaches are limited in their ability to extend these successes to systems that remain robust in the presence of noise, disorder, and manufacturing variability, or that can adapt their behavior under changing external conditions. This project aims to address these challenges by developing a unifying modeling framework capable of describing systems composed of many interacting components subjected to diverse stimuli and stochastic perturbations. This work will advance scientific knowledge and enable transformative technologies in robotics, medical devices, and advanced manufacturing. In addition, this award will support the training of graduate and undergraduate students and integrate research and education through engaging learning opportunities in mechanical metamaterials. Periodic metamaterials composed of coupled bistable nodes have been shown to exhibit a wide range of functionalities, including sensing, actuation, and information processing. However, it remains challenging to understand and navigate the vast configurational space of these highly nonlinear systems, and existing modeling approaches typically provide insights that are specific to a given unit cell design. The goal of this project is to establish a modeling framework capable of translating behaviors across different metamaterial systems, capturing multiple emergent responses, and quantifying the effects of perturbations, imperfections, and system size using tools from statistical physics. These methods are well suited to this effort because they describe macroscopic behavior in ways that are largely independent of microscopic details, and bistable metamaterials share strong analogies with well-studied statistical physics models such as the Ising model. The research will integrate theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches to provide new insight into how structure-scale mechanical response emerges from unit cell-scale elastic interactions and external forcing across a broad class of bistable mechanical metamaterials. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2541855 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Abigail Plummer | Institution: Trustees of Boston University, BOSTON, MA | Award Amount: $696,609 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2541855 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2541855.html