Rapidly deployable and morphable 3D mesostructures with applications in multimodal biomedical devices.

Structures that significantly and rapidly change their shapes and sizes upon external stimuli have widespread applications in a diversity of areas. The ability to miniaturize these deployable and morphable structures is essential for applications in fields that require high-spatial resolution or minimal invasiveness, such as biomechanics sensing, surgery, and biopsy. Despite intensive studies on the actuation mechanisms and material/structure strategies, it remains challenging to realize deployable and morphable structures in high-performance inorganic materials at small scales (e.

Soft three-dimensional network materials with rational bio-mimetic designs.

Many biological tissues offer J-shaped stress-strain responses, since their microstructures exhibit a three-dimensional (3D) network construction of curvy filamentary structures that lead to a bending-to-stretching transition of the deformation mode under an external tension. The development of artificial 3D soft materials and device systems that can reproduce the nonlinear, anisotropic mechanical properties of biological tissues remains challenging. Here we report a class of soft 3D network materials that can offer defect-insensitive, nonlinear mechanical responses closely matched with those of biological tissues.

Anti-plane transverse waves propagation in nanoscale periodic layered piezoelectric structures.

In this paper, anti-plane transverse wave propagation in nanoscale periodic layered piezoelectric structures is studied. The localization factor is introduced to characterize the wave propagation behavior. The transfer matrix method based on the nonlocal piezoelectricity continuum theory is used to calculate the localization factor.