CAREER: Mechanics of Beadwork Metamaterials

About This Grant

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research on the emergent mechanical properties of beadwork as a new class of programmable metamaterials. Beadwork is not only visually captivating but also mechanically fascinating. As a metamaterial, its mechanical properties arise from not just the materials used but also its structure. Fabricated by weaving thread through beads, beadwork combines complementary characteristics of textiles and granular matter into one material. For example, like textiles, beadwork is programmable to various shapes and like granular matter beadwork can rearrange to resist high loads. This work will explore the relationship between beadwork design and its mechanical properties. Insights from this work will not only promote the progress of science but also enable the use of beadwork as material in applications that advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare. For example, new technologies that require materials with varied properties such as soft robotics, wearable tech, and deployable structures. This CAREER award also supports integrated educational activities designed to broaden resources, perspectives, and participation at the intersection of STEAM disciplines of mechanical engineering, physics, and craft. Working towards developing a pipeline for the next generation of STEAM researchers and workforce, these activities include a graduate course on craft mechanics, online STEM-beadwork resources, instructor training, and K-12 STEM programming using beadwork. The award will directly drive these activities as beadwork is implemented in learning modules, hands-on demonstrations, and research opportunities. As a composite material system, beadwork combines mechanics of slender structures and packed grains, enabling them with programmatic design, tensile actuation, and extremely tunable stiffness. This CAREER project will support experiments on beadwork metamaterials to explore these and other emergent properties and develop predictive models that describe beadwork’s key mechanical and geometric features. In particular, the objective is to investigate the beadwork’s mechanical response to internal and external action, expected to be characterized by nonlinear deformation, internal contact and friction, fracture, and instability. In a gradual research approach, simpler, periodic two-dimensional designs to more complex three-dimensional configurations will be considered. Bead level material behavior, kinematics, and forces will be theorized and connected to effective structural response. Homogenization schemes based on lumped masses/energy will be used in developing approximate but efficient predictive models. The desktop-scale experimental platform for testing concepts in this project will be useful in related fields that encode tessellations. For example, beadwork shares concepts of topology and geometry that are used in the computer graphics community for developing meshes as well as in nanoscale chemistry with carbon nanostructures. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.