On-demand contactless programming of nonlinear elastic moduli in hard magnetic soft beam based broadband active lattice materials

Engineered honeycomb lattice materials with high specific strength and stiffness along with the advantage of programmable direction-dependent mechanical tailorability are being increasingly adopted for various advanced multifunctional applications. To use these artificial microstructures with unprecedented mechanical properties in the design of different application-specific structures, it is essential to investigate the effective elastic moduli and their dependence on the microstructural geometry and the physics of deformation at the elementary level. While it is possible to have a wide range of effective mechanical properties based on their designed microstructural geometry, most of the recent advancements in this field lead to passive mechanical properties, meaning it is not possible to actively modulate the lattice-level properties after they are manufactured. Thus the on-demand control of mechanical properties is lacking, which is crucial for a range of multi-functional applications in advanced structural systems. To address this issue, we propose a new class of lattice materials wherein the beam-level multi-physical deformation behavior can be exploited as a function of external stimuli like magnetic field by considering hard magnetic soft beams. More interestingly, effective property modulation at the lattice level would be contactless without the necessity of having a complex network of electrical circuits embedded within the microstructure. We have developed a semi-analytical model for the nonlinear effective elastic properties of such programmable lattice materials under large deformation, wherein the mechanical properties can be modulated in an expanded design space of microstructural geometry and magnetic field. The numerical results show that the effective properties can be actively modulated as a function of the magnetic field covering a wide range (including programmable state transition with on-demand positive and negative values), leading to the behavior of soft polymer to stiff metals in a single lattice microstructure according to operational demands.