Viscoelastic Metamaterials

Mechanical metamaterials are artificial composites with tunable advanced mechanical properties. Particularly interesting types of mechanical metamaterials are flexible metamaterials, which harness internal rotations and instabilities to exhibit programmable deformations. However, to date such materials have mostly been considered using nearly purely elastic constituents such as neo-Hookean rubbers. Here we explore experimentally the mechanical snap-through response of metamaterials that are made of constituents that exhibit large viscoelastic relaxation effects, encountered in the vast majority of rubbers, in particular in 3D printed rubbers. We show that they exhibit a very strong sensitivity to the loading rate. In particular, the mechanical instability is strongly affected beyond a certain loading rate. We rationalize our findings with a compliant mechanism model augmented with viscoelastic interactions, which captures qualitatively well the reported behavior, suggesting that the sensitivity to loading rate stems from the nonlinear and inhomogeneous deformation rate, provoked by internal rotations. Our findings bring a novel understanding of metamaterials in the dynamical regime and opens up avenues for the use of metamaterials for dynamical shape-changing as well as vibration and impact damping applications.