MIT engineers create metamaterial that is both strong and stretchy

MIT engineers have found a way to fabricate a metamaterial that is both strong and stretchy. The base material is typically highly rigid and brittle, but by printing it in precise, intricate patterns it can be made to form a structure that is both strong and flexible.

Metamaterials are synthetic materials with microscopic structures that give the overall material exceptional properties. Recently there has been a huge focus on designing metamaterials that are stronger and stiffer than their conventional counterparts, but there’s a trade-off: the stiffer a material, the less flexible it is.

The key to the new material’s dual properties is a combination of stiff microscopic struts and a softer woven architecture. This microscopic ‘double network,’ which is printed using a plexiglass-like polymer, produced a material that could stretch by more than four times its size without fully breaking. In comparison, the polymer in other forms has little to no stretch and shatters easily once cracked.

According to the researchers, the new double-network design can be applied to other materials, potentially opening the way to the fabrication of stretchy ceramics, glass and metals. Such tough yet bendy materials could be made into tear-resistant textiles, flexible semiconductors, electronic chip packaging and durable yet compliant scaffolds on which to grow cells for tissue repair.

‘We are opening up this new territory for metamaterials,’ said Carlos Portela, the Robert N Noyce career development associate professor at MIT. ‘You could print a double-network metal or ceramic, and you could get a lot of these benefits, in that it would take more energy to break them, and they would be significantly more stretchable.’

Along with other research groups, Portela and his colleagues have typically designed metamaterials by printing or nanofabricating microscopic lattices using conventional polymers similar to plexiglass and ceramic. The specific pattern, or architecture, that they print can impart exceptional strength and impact resistance to the resulting metamaterial.

Several years ago, Portela was curious whether a metamaterial could be made from an inherently stiff material, but be patterned in a way that would turn it into a much softer, stretchier version.

‘We realised that the field of metamaterials has not really tried to make an impact in the soft matter realm,’ he said. ‘So far, we’ve all been looking for the stiffest and strongest materials possible.’

Instead, he looked for a way to synthesise softer, stretchier metamaterials. Rather than printing microscopic struts and trusses, similar to those of conventional lattice-based metamaterials, he and his team made an architecture of interwoven springs, or coils. They found that, while the material they used was itself stiff like plexiglass, the resulting woven metamaterial was soft and springy, like rubber.

‘They were stretchy, but too soft and compliant,’ Portela recalls.

In looking for ways to bulk up their softer metamaterial, the team found inspiration in an entirely different material: hydrogel. Hydrogels are soft, stretchy, jelly-like materials that are composed of mostly water and a bit of polymer structure. Researchers have devised ways to make hydrogels that are both soft and stretchy, and also tough. They do so by combining polymer networks with very different properties, such as a network of molecules that is naturally stiff, which gets chemically cross-linked with another molecular network that is inherently soft. Portela and his colleagues wondered whether such a double-network design could be adapted to metamaterials.

‘That was our “aha” moment,’ Portela said. ‘We thought: Can we get inspiration from these hydrogels to create a metamaterial with similar stiff and stretchy properties?’

For their new study, the team fabricated a metamaterial by combining two microscopic architectures. The first is a rigid, grid-like scaffold of struts and trusses. The second is a pattern of coils that weave around each strut and truss. Both networks are made from the same acrylic plastic and are printed in one go, using a high-precision, laser-based printing technique called two-photon lithography.

The researchers printed samples of the new double-network-inspired metamaterial, each measuring in size from several square microns to several square millimetres. They put the material through a series of stress tests, in which they attached either end of the sample to a specialised nanomechanical press and measured the force it took to pull the material apart. They also recorded high-resolution videos to observe the locations and ways in which the material stretched and tore as it was pulled apart.

They found that their new double-network design was able stretch three times its own length, which also happened to be ten times farther compared to a conventional lattice-patterned metamaterial printed with the same acrylic plastic. Portela said the new material’s stretchy resistance comes from the interactions between the material’s rigid struts and the messier, coiled weave as the material is stressed and pulled.

‘Think of this woven network as a mess of spaghetti tangled around a lattice. As we break the monolithic lattice network, those broken parts come along for the ride, and now all this spaghetti gets entangled with the lattice pieces,’ Portela explained. ‘That promotes more entanglement between woven fibres, which means you have more friction and more energy dissipation.’

In other words, the softer structure wound throughout the material’s rigid lattice takes on more stress thanks to multiple knots or entanglements promoted by the cracked struts. As this stress spreads unevenly through the material, an initial crack is unlikely to go straight through and quickly tear the material. What’s more, the team found that if they introduced strategic holes, or ‘defects’, in the metamaterial, they could further dissipate any stress that the material undergoes, making it even stretchier and more resistant to tearing apart.

‘You might think this makes the material worse,’ said study co-author James Utama Surjadi. ‘But we saw once we started adding defects, we doubled the amount of stretch we were able to do, and tripled the amount of energy that we dissipated. That gives us a material that’s both stiff and tough, which is usually a contradiction.’

The team has developed a computational framework that can help engineers estimate how a metamaterial will perform given the pattern of its stiff and stretchy networks. They envision such a blueprint will be useful in designing tear-proof textiles and fabrics.

‘We also want to try this approach on more brittle materials, to give them multifunctionality,’ Portela said. ‘So far we’ve talked of mechanical properties, but what if we could also make them conductive, or responsive to temperature? For that, the two networks could be made from different polymers that respond to temperature in different ways, so that a fabric can open its pores or become more compliant when it’s warm and can be more rigid when it’s cold.’

The research has been published in Nature Materials.