Nature has engineered complex designs to achieve advanced properties and functionalities over hundreds of thousands of years, representing a fundamental source of inspiration to solve several mankind’s scientific challenges and engineering problems. For instance, it has been shown that a hierarchical organization over multiple length scales allows enhanced quasi-static mechanical properties, while the relative orientation of adjacent chiral centres strongly affects the physical properties of a polymer, and internal heterogeneous architectures may result in shape changing systems, to cite a few examples.
During this seminar I will discuss how bio-inspiration may be used to enhance the potential of phononic crystals and elastic metamaterials presenting examples of multi-scale, kinematic enriched and tunable metamaterials leading to selective wave dispersion diagram alterations. I will present both numerical and experimental results, as well as discuss the main advantages and limitations of the approaches with respect to conventional metamaterials.
