Programmable Stiffness Metamaterial
During the summer of 2018, I joined Professor Jonathan Hopkins’s UCLA Flexible Research Group to expand on a project I started in his graduate course. Refusing to abandon a great idea after the class ended, I used the phase changes of gallium to develop a metamaterial with programmable stiffness properties. My work on this project was posted in Advanced Science News. You can read the article here. This project was also published in the Advanced Engineering Materials research journal, and the publication can be downloaded as a pdf here:
Essentially, I constructed lattice of gallium spheres suspended on wires and casted in Dragon Skin (a silicone rubber). By sending a current through a wire, I can selectively melt a row of the lattice and control its stiffness in that specific area. Think of it as 125 gallium balloons fused together. Ultimately, this project served as a proof-of-concept design, a step towards achieving a metamaterial that can locally achieve dramatic changes in stiffness based on wireless control instructions. All the details can be read in the paper above!
