Issue 43, 2018

Mechanics of biomimetic 4D printed structures

Abstract

Recent progress in additive manufacturing and materials engineering has led to a surge of interest in shape-changing plate and shell-like structures. Such structures are typically printed in a planar configuration and, when exposed to an ambient stimulus such as heat or humidity, swell into a desired three-dimensional geometry. Viewed through the lens of differential geometry and elasticity, the application of the physical stimulus can be understood as a local change in the metric of a two dimensional surface embedded in three dimensions. To relieve the resulting elastic frustration, the structure will generally bend and buckle out-of-plane. Here, we propose a numerical approach to convert the discrete geometry of filament bilayers, associated with print paths of inks with given material properties, into continuous plates with inhomogeneous growth patterns and thicknesses. When subject to prescribed growth anisotropies, we can then follow the evolution of the shapes into their final form. We show that our results provide a good correspondence between experiments and simulations, and lead to a framework for the prediction and design of shape-changing structures.

Graphical abstract: Mechanics of biomimetic 4D printed structures

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
14 May 2018
Accepted
10 Oct 2018
First published
18 Oct 2018

Soft Matter, 2018,14, 8771-8779

Author version available

Mechanics of biomimetic 4D printed structures

W. M. van Rees, E. A. Matsumoto, A. S. Gladman, J. A. Lewis and L. Mahadevan, Soft Matter, 2018, 14, 8771 DOI: 10.1039/C8SM00990B

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