Seminars

Kirigami mechanisms and mechanical metamaterials

Kirigami, the art of cutting paper, offers novel ways to utilize geometric control in thin elastic sheets for the design of highly deformable and complex behavior of materials and structures. We draw our inspiration from this art and introduce new approaches to understand the assembling of complex shapes and mechanical actuation through careful choice of geometry and topology of cuts on thin sheets. We present energy efficient mechanisms designs and how their identification is encoded in the network geometry of the cut pattern. Our model demonstrates a robust link between simulation and experiment on length scales ranging over six orders of magnitude, thus allowing for design of atomically-thin 2D materials.