Professor Chen Yan’s team has recently designed a novel tristable kirigami cuboid and a series of multistable metamaterials through constructing a group of elastic hinges with a specific effective range of motion, further promoting the development of 5G triple-band communication.

Their research paperKirigami-Based Metastructures with Programmable Multistability, with the corresponding author Prof. Chen Yan from TJU’s School of Mechanical Engineering and the primary author Dr. Zhang Xiao, has been published online in the PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.

Boasting the contributions of Prof. Ma Kaixue, Prof. Luo Yu, Associate Prof. Ma Jiayao, doctoral student Li Mengyue, master student Wang Xiaoyan from TJU, as well as Prof. Zhong You from the University of Oxford, their research has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Xplorer Prize of Tencent Foundation. Multistable structures can rapidly reconfigure structures to meet certain needs, which have claimed a decisive place in metamaterials, robotics, mechanical diodes, mechanical memory storage, and deployable structures.

Through their endeavor, the advanced research will pave the way for the development of multistable structures, and promote future explorations of frequency reconfigurable antennas, tunable metamaterials, deployable structures, and reconfigurable robotics.

Original Paper Link: Xiao Zhang, Jiayao Ma, Mengyue Li, Zhong You, Xiaoyan Wang, Yu Luo, Kaixue Ma, Yan Chen*, Kirigami-based Metastructures with Programmable Multistability, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, PNAS, 2022, 119(11), e2117649119,https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2117649119

By Han Shiyu

Editor: Sun Xiaofang