Morpho-Active Materials: Fabricating auxetic structures with bioinspired behavior

Abstract

This practice-led research lies at the intersection of design, craft, materials science, and biology. Inspired by the responsive mechanism of plant's biological actuators, and Nature's outstanding capacity of attaining maximal performances while using minimum resources. This thesis explores how to achieve a higher level of integration between the generation of form and behavior with its materialization and fabrication.This research proposes to endow a conventional laminar elastic material with unconventional behavior. Taking as inspiration plants biological actuators, which allows them to sense and adapt according to different environmental stimuli. We explored, developed, and fabricated a range of cellular structures (and in particular auxetics) that have out of the plane shape morphing capabilities, displaying a distinctive behavior in response to a design pattern (spatial cell arrangement) and an actuating force.The final design is a material/geometry-based actuator with reversible behavior, an active material with integrated tunable and responsive capacity which provides the capabilities to sense, adapt and respond to external stimuli within the structure of the material.