A 3D-printed molecular ferroelectric metamaterial
Yong Hu, Zipeng Guo, Andrew Ragonese, Taishan Zhu, Saurabh Khuje, Changning Li, Jeffrey C. Grossman, Chi Zhou, Mostafa Nouh, Shenqiang Ren
Abstract
Molecular ferroelectrics combine electromechanical coupling and electric polarizabilities, offering immense promise in stimuli-dependent metamaterials. Despite such promise, current physical realizations of mechanical metamaterials remain hindered by the lack of rapid-prototyping ferroelectric metamaterial structures. Here, we present a continuous rapid printing strategy for the volumetric deposition of water-soluble molecular ferroelectric metamaterials with precise spatial control in virtually any three-dimensional (3D) geometry by means of an electric-field-assisted additive manufacturing. We demonstrate a scaffold-supported ferroelectric crystalline lattice that enables self-healing and a reprogrammable stiffness for dynamic tuning of mechanical metamaterials with a long lifetime and sustainability. A molecular ferroelectric architecture with resonant inclusions then exhibits adaptive mitigation of incident vibroacoustic dynamic loads via an electrically tunable subwavelength-frequency band gap. The findings shown here pave the way for the versatile additive manufacturing of molecular ferroelectric metamaterials.