Harnessing Instabilities to Design Tunable Architected Cellular Materials

Mechanical instabilities are traditionally regarded as a route toward failure. However, they can also be exploited to design architected cellular materials with tunable functionality. In this review, we focus on three examples and show that mechanical instabilities in architected cellular materials can be harnessed ( a ) to design auxetic materials, ( b ) to control the propagation of elastic waves, and ( c ) to realize reusable energy-absorbing materials. Together, these examples highlight a new strategy to design tunable systems across a wide range of length scales.