Extreme resilience and dissipation in heterogeneous elasto-plastomeric crystals

We present a microstructure-topology-based approach for designing macroscopic, heterogeneous soft materials that exhibit outstanding mechanical resilience and energy dissipation. We investigate a variety of geometric configurations of resilient yet dissipative heterogeneous elasto-plastomeric materials that possess long-range order whose microstructural features are inspired by crystalline metals and block copolymers. We combine experiments and numerical simulations on 3D-printed prototypes to study the extreme mechanics of these heterogeneous soft materials under cyclic deformation conditions up to an extreme strain of >200% with strain rates ranging from quasi-static (5.0 × 10⁻³ s⁻¹) to high levels of >6.0 × 10¹ s⁻¹. Moreover, we investigate the complexity of elastic and inelastic “unloading” mechanisms crucial for the understanding of shape recovery and energy dissipation in extreme loading situations. Furthermore, we propose a simple but physically intuitive approach for designing microstructures that exhibit a nearly isotropic behavior in both elasticity and inelasticity across different crystallographic orientations from small to large strains. Overall, our study sets a significant step toward the development of sustainable, heterogeneous soft material architectures at macroscopic scales that can withstand harsh mechanical environments.