Digitally Reprogrammable Materials for Adaptive Mechanical Behavior

Abstract

Conventional engineering materials and structures typically exhibit functions that are fixed after fabrication, limiting their ability to adapt to changing tasks, operational demands, and environments. This dissertation presents digitally reprogrammable material systems that enable post-fabrication control over both structural geometry and mechanical behavior through electrical inputs. A self-evolving mechanical metasurface is first developed to achieve rapid and continuous shape morphing through spatially distributed Lorentz forces generated by electrically driven filamentary conductors in an external magnetic field. This approach enables programmable deformation and dynamic geometric reconfiguration without requiring manual redesign of the material architecture. In parallel, a digital metamaterial platform with rewritable phase architectures is developed to realize programmable mechanical behavior in bulk matter. By allowing internal material states to be electrically rewritten after fabrication, this platform provides a strategy for digitally tuning mechanical response in a reversible and reconfigurable manner. Taken together, these advances establish a general framework for digitally reprogrammable materials whose geometry and mechanical behavior can be updated on demand. The resulting concepts open new opportunities for adaptive structures, soft robotic systems, and mechanically intelligent devices.