Jammed packings of granular materials display complex mechanical response. For example, the ensemble-averaged shear modulus $\langle G\rangle$ increases as a power law in pressure $p$ for static packings of soft spherical particles that can rearrange during compression. We seek to design granular materials with shear moduli that can either increase or decrease with pressure without particle rearrangements even in the large-system limit. To do this, we construct tessellated granular metamaterials by joining multiple particle-filled cells together. We focus on cells that contain a small number of bidisperse disks in two dimensions. We first study the mechanical properties of individual disk-filled cells with three types of boundaries: periodic boundary conditions (PBC), fixed-length walls (FXW), and flexible walls (FLW). Hypostatic jammed packings are found for cells with FLW, but not in cells with PBC and FXW, and they are stabilized by quartic modes of the dynamical matrix. The shear modulus of a single cell depends linearly on $p$. We find that the slope of the shear modulus with pressure ${\lambda }_c<0$ for all packings in single cells with PBC where the number of particles per cell $N\ge 6$. In contrast, single cells with FXW and FLW can possess ${\lambda }_c>0$, as well as ${\lambda }_c<0$, for $N\le 16$. We show that we can force the mechanical properties of multicell granular metamaterials to possess those of single cells by constraining the end points of the outer walls and enforcing an affine shear response. These studies demonstrate that tessellated granular metamaterials provide a platform for the design of soft materials with specified mechanical properties.

• Received 17 March 2023
• Accepted 22 August 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.108.034901