Wave control through soft microstructural curling: bandgap shifting, reconfigurable anisotropy and switchable chirality

In this work, we discuss and numerically validate a strategy to attain reversible macroscopic changes in the wave propagation characteristics of cellular metamaterials with soft microstructures. The proposed cellular architecture is characterized by unit cells featuring auxiliary populations of symmetrically-distributed smart cantilevers stemming from the nodal locations. Through an external stimulus (the application of an electric field), we induce extreme, localized, reversible curling deformation of the cantilevers-a shape modification which does not affect the overall shape, stiffness and load bearing capability of the structure. By carefully engineering the spatial pattern of straight (non activated) and curled (activated) cantilevers, we can induce several profound modifications of the phononic characteristics of the structure: generation and/or shifting of total and partial bandgaps, cell symmetry relaxation (which implies reconfigurable wave beaming), and chirality switching. While in this work we discuss the specific case of composite cantilevers with a PDMS core and active layers of electrostrictive terpolymer P(VDF-TrFE-CTFE), the strategy can be extended to other smart materials (such as dielectric elastomers or shape-memory polymers).