The extreme mechanics of viscoelastic metamaterials

Mechanical metamaterials made of flexible building blocks can exhibit a plethora of extreme mechanical responses, such as negative elastic constants, shape-changes, programmability, and memory. To date, dissipation has largely remained overlooked for such flexible metamaterials. As a matter of fact, extensive care has often been devoted in the constitutive materials’ choice to avoid strong dissipative effects. However, in an increasing number of scenarios, where metamaterials are loaded dynamically, dissipation cannot be ignored. In this Research Update, we show that the interplay between mechanical instabilities and viscoelasticity can be crucial and that they can be harnessed to obtain new functionalities. We first show that this interplay is key to understanding the dynamical behavior of flexible dissipative metamaterials that use buckling and snapping as functional mechanisms. We further discuss the new opportunities that spatial patterning of viscoelastic properties offer for the design of mechanical metamaterials with properties that depend on the loading rate.