Adaptive Energy Dissipator with Compression-to-Tension Design

Energy-dissipating materials are vital for daily life and engineering applications. Among all the energy-dissipating materials, the polymer-based ones are reusable and loading rate-dependent, but suffer from two limitations: i) they cannot synchronously achieve high loss factor and high modulus; ii) their stretch-induced high energy dissipation capability cannot be fully used in compression-dominated applications. To address them, a high-energy-dissipating (HED) polymer is reported with two types of dynamic physical crosslinks (hydrogen bonds and dynamic coordination bonds) to obtain a high loss factor (tanδ up to 2), modulus (110.5 MPa), and dissipated energy density (26.8 J cm⁻³). To fully liberate its stretch-dominated dissipation under compression, HED-based compression-to-tension (C2T) structures are designed that convert compression into tension on the HED strips. Multimaterial 3D printing is utilized to fabricate such C2T structures whose energy dissipation capability is tunable and ≈100 times higher than that of HED-based octet lattices. Furthermore, the C2T structures are used to develop artificial intervertebral discs and low-frequency vibration isolators to demonstrate their adaptive capability of dissipating impact and vibration energies in bio-implants and precision instruments. The proposed HED polymers and their C2T structures offer a new way to design and develop high-performance energy-dissipating metadevices.