Study of electromechanical metamaterial systems

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The development of electromechanically coupled smart piezoelectric systems, which can respond to environment stimuli in real time and are compact, sensitive and durable has received considerable attention from research and industrial communities in engineering. Because of their advanced functionalities superior to the convectional structures the applications of these smart piezoelectric structures are widely spread into diverse areas. The race is always on to explore, develop and exploit new products of smart technology, which provides new opportunities for the associated industries, but also impose challenges for keeping to be competitive. The advances in manufacturing techniques have enabled the development of new classes of smart structures that embed sensing, actuation and communication at high densities. This embedding can be so tight that the distinction between structure and materials blur so these smart structures can be considered equivalently as new smart materials. These advances also make it possible to design the detailed local structures of the smart systems. It is the objective of the current project to develop new integrated piezoelectric smart material systems, which consist of periodically arranged specially designed material cells. The electromechanical properties of the smart material will be dominated by both the property of the material cells and also the periodic structure of the material. Different from traditional composite materials for which the desired properties, such as higher stiffness and strength, come from utilizing the `best' properties of the individual constituents, the electromechanical properties of the new smart materials are tailored not only by material composition but also, and more importantly, by the detailed geometrical design of the local structure of the material cells. The theoretical study will be focused on (i) the development of mechanical models capable of describing the complicated electromechanical behaviour of the designed local material cells, (ii) the design of local material cell optimized to achieve advanced or exotic electromechanical properties (metamaterials), (iii) the integration of the local cells into periodic structures to form the desired smart materials, (iv) the characterization and evaluation of the electromechanical properties of the new smart materials, and (v) the evaluation of failure conditions of the smart materials. The experimental study will be conducted to build and evaluate the properties of the new smart materials based on traditional manufacturing techniques and/or additive manufacturing. In the short term, the current research will provide new ideas and guidelines on how to design advanced piezoelectric smart materials with new properties not available conventionally. In the long term, the outcome of the current research could be used in the design of the next generation programmable smart materials, which can be easily controlled and communicated with.