3D Construction of a Tilted Cuboid Mechanical Metamaterial

Functional metamaterials are gradually becoming the frontier of scientific research and industrial applications. Among them, reconfigurable mechanical metamaterial with inbuilt motion capability could result in unusual physical properties such as shape tunability and programmable density and stiffness. Inspired by the transformable cuboid structure that was first investigated by Ron Resch, we proposed a tilted cuboid structure that can fold into a 3D configuration. By designing the individual building units, face angles and tessellation pattern, we are able to construct a series of reconfigurable structures with various shape, twist and permeability feature. Based on our approach, a configuration method to build multi-layer metamaterial is proposed, and it can be generalized to other tilted structures with different building units. The volumetric strains of different models are analyzed, and the result shows the metamaterial has a massive deformation ability as the maximum volume can be four times of the packaged volume. The tilted cuboid structure is highly flexible with variable stiffness and permeability, and can be used to develop metamaterials, large deformation devices and kinetic architectures.