Tunable Failure in Non-periodic Architected Materials Inspired by Slime Mold Growth

The field of architected materials has been explored in many disciplines over the past decade, it has yet to be fully explored in civil engineering and architecture. From the perspective of material constitution, most existing efforts on metamaterials primarily use the elastic buckling of soft materials, while common infrastructure materials lack the ability to undergo such large deformation/strain. In addition, most studies to date have maintained the symmetry of material and studied the simple periodic form. Inspired by slime mold growth, we explored a new class of non-periodic cellular materials and conducted proof-of-concept experiments on 3D-printed specimens. We found that simple changes on the archetectures of material can lead to significant differences in failure mechanism. Therefore, this study paves the road for the future design of resilient infrastructure involving the ability to rebound from extreme events and the corresponding repair approaches to recover capacity after those events.