A New Design Strategy for Highly Multistable Kirigami Metamaterials

Multistable architected materials are proposed as promising candidates for shock absorption, wave guiding, and shape transformation. However, current design strategies typically rely on one-off unit cell designs with limited stable states, arranged in periodic tessellations. In this study, a systematic approach is presented for designing planar multistable kirigami metamaterials. This method is based on a bistable triangular kirigami building block, along with a set of compatibility rules that enable the creation of both periodic and aperiodic metamaterials. Guided by an analytical model that captures the nonlinear behavior of the building block, we successfully fabricate and test a diverse range of multistable kirigami metamaterials. Furthermore, the emergent resetting of deployed structures under random actuation is demonstrated, and a generalization to 3D kirigami designs is proposed. This work establishes a versatile design platform for resettable multistable architectures capable of extreme mechanical deformations.