Engineers are building 3D materials from nanoscale building blocks that can later be taken apart and reused, rather than thrown away. These are metamaterials—structures whose properties come from their architecture, not their chemistry—and they can do things no natural material can. The problem is that most metamaterials are made as flat, 2D surfaces, and they are not designed for recycling. This project tackles both gaps: it aims to build scalable 3D versions and to make them disassemblable at end of life. A key novelty is incorporating mechanical bistability—a snap-through effect—at sub-micron sizes, which has never been done before. If successful, this could lead to materials that absorb or harvest energy, act as mechanical sensors, or resist fouling, all while being recyclable. The work is applied, guided by specifications from industry partners, and focuses on technically viable solutions for UK translation. It is not a fundamental science project; it is a direct push toward usable, sustainable metamaterials for manufacturing, sensing, and energy applications.
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Reconstructable Nano-Opto-Mechanical Metamaterials (ReNOMM) seeks to assemble nanoscale building blocks into 3D materials with optical, mechanical, and functional properties unlike anything found in nature, and at their end-of-life disassemble the building blocks for re-use. This project is uniquely placed to develop new paradigms for metamaterials, and create a larger, sustainable and more immediate impact for industrial applications. Metamaterials are a growing field within the UK, but to deliver a step change in our understanding of how to design, build and recycle these materials from end to end requires an interdisciplinary team across a wide set of fields. Metamaterials provide emergent properties by combining building blocks to elicit more than simple averaging over all component materials involved, instead giving exciting opportunities for new functionalities that are not found in natural materials. RENOMM is designed to push into a new set of opportunity spaces, and to form new productive collaborations. We do this by developing core projects that address the key challenge of designing and building 3D sub-micron metamaterials in a scalable way. A key novel aspect to be directly addressed in RENOMM is the incorporation of mechanical bistability and nonlinearities, which has not yet been realised at sub-micron sizes. This exploits switching phenomena previously developed at the macroscale, but now integrated into metamaterial architectures to provide radically new unusual properties such as energy absorption and harvesting, mechanical intelligence, enhanced sensors, anti-fouling protection and more. Incorporating these meta-mechanical properties yields novel optical, thermal, sensing, photochemical, and other functionalities. Using a demonstrator approach, aided by specifications from industry partners, we focus on more technically viable solutions for metamaterials, driving this field and giving the optimum outcome for UK translation, as well as building an expert array of users and diverse use cases.
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