Haozhe Zhang | Mechanics of Soft-Hard Integrated Materials and Structures

Soft-hard material integration is ubiquitous in biological materials and structures, such as the human body with the integration of soft muscles. The inherent distinction between these soft and hard materials has led to fundamental differences in their mechanical, thermal, and physical behaviors. Inspired by these soft-hard material integration principles, numerous man-made functional materials and structures with great mechanical/optical/electronical/acoustic properties has been designed.

Our research aims to understand fundamental mechanics principles that could enable creations of intelligent new design concepts and approaches of functional materials and structures capable of being readily manufactured for desired applications.

Here is a mechanical Janus structure enabled by soft and hard materials integration. We established, in the combination of extensive experimental, theoretical, and computational studies, the design principle of soft-hard materials integrated mechanical Janus structures and address their unique rotation mechanism. The superstructures assembled by the Janus structure units can be reorganized into well-ordered pattern by controlling their local rotations via programming the mechanical stimuli. This funding provides a direct route of designing superstructures by leveraging mechanical Janus structures with unique soft-hard material integration. Applications are conducted to demonstrate the features and functionalities of assembled superstructures with local ordered organizations in regulating and filtering acoustic wave propagations, thereby providing exemplification applications of mechanical Janus design in functional structures and devices.

Mechanical Janus structure (left) and the programmable assembled superstructures in respose to compression stimuli (right)

For more information, please refer to:

Haozhe Zhang^, Weizhu Yang, Qingchang Liu, Yuan Gao, Zhufeng Yue, Baoxing Xu. Mechanical Janus Structures by Soft-Hard Material Integration. Advanced Materials. 2208339

In addition, we also investigated the mechanism of stretchable metasurfaces. Combining theoretical and computational studies, we, for the first time, shown how the rotation of nano-rods effect the optical properties.

Stretchable metasurface with a periodical arrangement of optical scatter antennas, and the effect of rotation to wavelight

For more information, please refer to:

Haozhe Zhang^, Weizhu Yang, Baoxing Xu. Rotation Mechanics of Optical Scatters in Stretchable Metasurfaces. International Journal of Solids and Structures. 191-192(2020)566-576

Moreover, we also designed a two-dimensional robot by integrating soft-hard materials with structural design and demonstrate a variety of in-plane locomotion modes.And we also developed a theory to quantitatively predict the locomotion direction and step distance.

The history of cyclic strain applied to the robots (top) to achieve desirable walking trajectories (triangle, rectangle, and pentagram) (bottom)

For more information, please refer to:

Haozhe Zhang^, Baoxing Xu. Soft-hard material integration enabled programmable robotic locomotion. Applied Physics Letters. 121(2022)214104