SUMMARY
Compared with conventional materials, architected materials have many unusual and interesting properties. Multimaterial viscoelastic architected materials are those that are not fully investigated and understood. As temperature and time are two important parameters that the mechanical properties of viscoelastic materials depend on, these two parameters can be used to tune the elastic instabilities of multimaterial thermoviscoelastic architected materials. For example, one multimaterial viscoelastic architected material can have different snap-through behaviors when it is compressed under different temperature or strain rate. Moreover, it is also possible to get snapping pattern switching for multilayer multimaterial architected materials with pseudo-bistability when holding the pre-snapped structure for a certain time. By properly integrating different viscoelastic materials into a periodic structure, it is possible to enable dramatic different responses of these structures, which have applications as reconfigurable and programmable architected materials.This project will address the fundamental mechanics and material problems regarding the buckling response of multimaterial thermoviscoelastic architected materials with snap-through instabilities. Using analytical model, FEA simulations and experiments of fabricated samples, this project will study the influence of temperature and strain history parameters (such as strain rate and holding time) on the snap-through buckling of one-dimensional (1D) viscoelastic multimaterial architected materials. Moreover, this project will also study potential 2D architected materials with controllable snapping responses.