Curvature screening in draped mechanical metamaterial sheets

Abstract

We develop a framework to understand the mechanics of metamaterial sheets on curved surfaces. Here we have constructed a continuum elastic theory of mechanical metamaterials by introducing an auxiliary, scalar gauge-like field that absorbs the strain along the soft mode and projects out the stiff ones. We propose a general form of the elastic energy of a mechanism based metamaterial sheet and specialize to the cases of dilational metamaterials and shear metamaterials conforming to positively and negatively curved substrates in the Föppl–Von Kármán limit of small strains. We perform numerical simulations of these systems and obtain good agreement with our analytical predictions. This work provides a framework that can be easily extended to explore non-linear soft modes in metamaterial elasticity in future.