Programmable Buckling-based negative stiffness metamaterial

Programmable mechanical metamaterials, whose properties would vary once their service environment changed, have a great prospect in many application scenarios. In this paper, a novel buckling-based negative stiffness (NS) mechanical metamaterial, consisting of pre-compressed elastic curved beams, is proposed, and its mechanical properties can be programmed by lateral confinement. Experiments and numerical simulations were both conducted to investigate its mechanical properties. Research results showed that multi-stability of the proposed NS metamaterial was programmable and it could be applied to tune the elastic wave propagation. Moreover, some improvement was made to simplify the structure and increase the efficiency of programming process.