Morphable 3D architectures enabled by shear-guided approach

3D structures and electronic devices assembled through mechanically guided approaches have found important applications in a wide spectrum of emerging fields, including healthcare, biomedical engineering, wearable devices, robotics, among others. To broaden the obtainable functional 3D architectures via mechanical pathways, in this work, a shear-guided assembly approach is demonstrated. A series of structures in forms of ribbon, membrane and hybrid configurations with previously inaccessible geometrical features, such as reversible local flips and centrosymmetric charity are showcased. Finite element analysis (FEA) is performed, suggesting that such shear-induced structures are capable of reversible post-assembly shape transformation among different modes. Given the above, a facile design, consisting of two ribbon-like 3D units (dual-3D-unit design), is introduced and carefully calibrated for shear sensing. Notably, such design is capable of translating the hard-to-measure shear deformation into easily-accessed vertical displacements while insensitive to finite tensile loadings. A multifunctional arrayed electronic interface is fabricated using such dual-3D-unit design, suggesting promising potentials in human–machine interactions.