Bio-Inspired Morphological Evolution of Metastructures with New Operation Modalities

Harnessing the power of natural evolution for automated exploration of novel forms of metastructures is likely to be the next technological revolution of the material science. Herein, the principles of evolution into the metamaterial design and discovery process to directly evolve thousands of metastructures with hitherto-unknown structures and new modalities of operation are embedded. In this so-called evolving metamaterial (EM) concept, evolution takes place by randomly creating an initial population of parent metamaterial entities that pass on their genetic material to their offspring through variation, reproduction, and selection. The metamaterial configurations with desired response emerge during this evolutionary process. The EM concept presents a different approach for direct morphological evolution of metamaterial microstructures using merely a piece of matter. For the biologically inspired evolution of mechanical metamaterials, this piece is chosen to be a representative unit cell to launch the design process. This paradigm shift by creating an evolutionary computational framework for the exploration of a series of proof-of-concept 2D mechanical metamaterial structures with maximum bulk modulus, maximum shear modulus, and minimum Poisson's ratio is studied. The capability of the proposed approach for discovering 3D is examined by exploring a suite of 3D configurations with maximum bulk modulus.

Automated summary

Harnessing the power of natural evolution, a concept called evolving metamaterial (EM) is introduced to directly evolve thousands of metastructures with unknown structures and new modes of operation. By randomly creating an initial population of parent metamaterial entities and passing their genetic material to offspring through variation, reproduction, and selection, desired metamaterial configurations emerge. The proposed approach demonstrates the capability to explore both 2D and 3D mechanical metamaterial structures with specific properties such as maximum bulk modulus and minimum Poisson's ratio.