Nanocomposite Metamaterial Architectures for Guiding Energy Dissipation and Wave Propagation

The need for lightweight materials that mitigate the hostile ballistic and blast threats encountered by soldiers is paramount to soldier protection. Our team proposes to design and fabricate multi-scale, Nanocomposite MetaMaterial Architectures (NMAs) that revolutionize the ability to guide energy dissipation and wave propagation. Materials design and fabrication will span multiple length scales, from the molecular to the micrometer to the millimeter. Our experimental approach will integrate across these scales using chemical synthesis/design, synthetic holographic nanolithography, projection microstereolithography, microfluidics for controlling flow fabrication, 3D printing and high speed sintering for fabrication of structured metamaterials through careful control of geometric placement of materials at the ones to tens to hundreds of micrometers. The combination of inherent material behavior and specific geometric placement of material provides unprecedented opportunities to design hybrid metamaterials which can mitigate ballistic and blast threats. The materials design will be guided by micromechanical modeling of the hybrid metamaterial structures. The meta-structures offer avenues for manipulating wave propagation, for broadening the rate constants of the materials, for offering multiple dissipation mechanisms over multiple timescales, and for tailoring surface topologies. The meta-structures can also be designed to be tunable or switchable upon the application of load or other environmental condition (temperature, humidity, light).