Damage tolerant ultralightweight mechanical metamaterials (MMs) for the next-generation large scale all-electric aircrafts

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Aviation emissions accounted for 7% of UK Greenhouse Gas emissions in 2018, which suggests electrification could have a large impact on decarbonizing the aviation sector. The successful realization of large scale all-electric aircraft architectures is heavily dependent on breakthrough in high-performance structural materials to overcome the various limitations faced by the conventional materials. Mechanical metamaterials (MMs) are a group of man-made architected materials that can be tailored to achieve unprecedented mechanical properties and multifunctionality through geometric arrangements rather than material properties of the constituents. The proposed research aims to establish a feasible design route to create damage tolerant ultralightweight mechanical metamaterials (MMs) for the next-generation large scale all-electric aircrafts. Damage tolerance is a fundamental requirement for high performance structural materials. Structural materials are expected to (i) fail in a progressive manner that can give warning to failure events, and (ii) have good load bearing capacity with presence of flaws. Natural cellular materials, such as marine mussels, honeycombs, woods, trabecular bones, plant parenchyma and sponges, benefit from the disorderliness within their internal microstructures to achieve highly damage tolerant behaviours. Inspired by this, the objectives of this research are to (1) open up a novel design pathway for damage tolerant ultralightweight MMs by engineering controlled degrees of disorderliness into initially periodic, ordered metamaterial systems. The initiative will be supported by novel, mechanics informed data-driven approaches that can tune the distribution of disorderliness within the MMs, (2) design new classes of ultralightweight MMs with high damage tolerance, (3) establish the design principles of high performance, damage tolerant ultralightweight MMs, and (4) evaluate the effectiveness for multifunctional applications of MMs for all-electric aircraft architectures.