Programmable Stimuli-Responsive Mechanical Metamaterials for Information Storage and Logic Processing

Mechanical metamaterials have attracted significant interest for their ability to achieve extraordinary mechanical properties, and various control and programming strategies for active mechanical metamaterials have been extensively explored. Inspired by deformation mechanisms governed by mechanical instabilities and heterogeneous material distribution, we propose two fundamental building blocks featuring horizontally constrained inclined beam configurations but exhibiting opposite response behaviors. By strategically arranging liquid crystal elastomer-based active regions and tuning geometric parameters, the energy bifurcation points of these units can be programmatically modulated to achieve tailored functionalities under mechanical actuation and temperature variation. Integrating these units as encoding components, we demonstrate diverse structural configurations and assembly strategies that enable programmable response and deformation systems with binary information storage and mechanical logic computing capabilities. These systems showcase potential applications in untethered logic controllers and information encryption devices.