Electromagnetic (EM) metamaterials with tailored properties are developed for wave manipulation, filtering, and cloaking for aerospace and defense applications. While traditional EM metamaterials exhibit fixed behaviors due to unchangeable material properties and geometries after fabrication, reconfigurable EM metamaterials allow for tunable performance through electrical/mechanical reconfiguration strategies. Traditional biasing circuit‐based electrical reconfiguration poses challenges due to complex circuit design, while motor‐driven mechanical reconfiguration can lead to bulky and tethered structures with restricted adaptability. Herein, magnetically actuated structurally reconfigurable EM metamaterials with enhanced adaptability/conformability to different geometries, showing merits of fast, reversible, and programmable shape morphing, are developed. Magnetic actuation enables metamaterial's mechanical reconfiguration between flat deployed, flat folded, curved deployed, and curved folded states for both conformal and freestanding 3D shape morphing. Locally, the EM metamaterials fold subwavelength units for tunable properties, switching between all‐pass and band‐stop behaviors upon structural reconfiguration. Globally, the structure can conform and morph to different curved surfaces. The structurally reconfigurable metamaterial also serves as a medium for customizable subwavelength units by rationally designing attached conductive patterns for varied filtering performances such as narrow‐band, dual‐band, and wide‐band filtering behaviors, illustrating the design flexibility and application versatility of the developed structurally reconfigurable EM metamaterial.
The tremendous increase in the number of components in typical electrical and communication modules requires low-cost, flexible and multifunctional sensing, energy harvesting, and communication modules that can readily reconfigure, depending on changes in their environment. Current subtractive manufacturing-based reconfigurable systems offer limited flexibility (limited finite number of discrete reconfiguration states) and have high fabrication cost and time requirements. Thus, this paper introduces an approach to solve the problem by combining additive manufacturing and origami principles to realize tunable electrical components that can be reconfigured over continuous-state ranges from folded (compact) to unfolded (large surface) configurations. Special “bridge-like” structures are introduced along the traces that increase their flexibility, thereby avoiding breakage during folding. These techniques allow creating truly flexible conductive traces that can maintain high conductivity even for large bending angles, further enhancing the states of reconfigurability. To demonstrate the idea, a Miura-Ori pattern is used to fabricate spatial filters—frequency-selective surfaces (FSSs) with dipole resonant elements placed along the fold lines. The electrical length of the dipole elements in these structures changes when the Miura-Ori is folded, which facilitates tunable frequency response for the proposed shape-reconfigurable FSS structure. Higher-order spatial filters are realized by creating multilayer Miura-FSS configurations, which further increase the overall bandwidth of the structure. Such multilayer Miura-FSS structures feature the unprecedented capability of on-the-fly reconfigurability to different specifications (multiple bands, broadband/narrowband bandwidth, wide angle of incidence rejection), requiring neither specialized substrates nor highly complex electronics, holding frames, or fabrication processes.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10081461
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 115
- Issue:
- 52
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 13210-13215
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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