PRESENTED ON-DEMAND ONLY: Understanding Continues Force/Energy-Displacement Path of Multistable Metamaterials to Program Their Functionalities

Mechanical metamaterials are designed to show properties that do not exist in conventional materials. Bistability and multistability as unconventional properties have recently been realized in alternative architectures, such as an inclined beam, curved beam, shallow shells, Origami, and shellulars. Using multistable mechanical metamaterials to develop deployable structures, electrical devices, and mechanical memories raises two unanswered questions. First, can mechanical instability be programmed to design sensors and memory devices? Second, how can we tune mechanical properties at the post-fabrication stage via loading/unloading? Answering these questions requires a thorough understanding of the snapping sequences and variations of the elastic energy in multistable metamaterials. Herein, we model multistable metamaterials as a chain to be transformed into the desired shape by applying deformation on one point. We develop an algorithm based on the snapping sequences for modeling a chain composed of bistable cells. Its solution provides a continuous path with all possible configurations and snap-back released energy. Furthermore, by investigating a 1D chain, we found instability forces are deriving factors of snapping sequence. It has been shown that the order of instability forces determines how many configurations are achievable. We comprehensively unveil the mechanics of deformation sequences and continuous force/energy-displacement curves. This method offers an insight into the programmability of multistable chains, which is exploited here to fabricate a mechanical sensor/memory with sampling and data reconstruction functionalities.