Soft mechanical metamaterials with unusual swelling behavior and tunable stress-strain curves.

ABSTRACT: Soft adaptable materials that change their shapes, volumes, and properties in response to changes under ambient conditions have important applications in tissue engineering, soft robotics, biosensing, and flexible displays. Upon water absorption, most existing soft materials, such as hydrogels, show a positive volume change, corresponding to a positive swelling. By contrast, the negative swelling represents a relatively unusual phenomenon that does not exist in most natural materials. The development of material systems capable of large or anisotropic negative swelling remains a challenge. We combine analytic modeling, finite element analyses, and experiments to design a type of soft mechanical metamaterials that can achieve large effective negative swelling ratios and tunable stress-strai

SUBMITTER: Zhang H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5993477 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature