Abstract Metamaterials are a class of engineered materials that often violate the routine assumptions that apply to ordinary materials. While metamaterials are typically assembled from carefully designed mesoscale units, the intended bulk-scale functionality can be obscured by unintended emergent effects driven by non-additive unit-unit interactions. These interactions are often sensitive to the number of units and their overall arrangement, making them extrinsic to the unit-scale design. As such, the emergence of extrinsic effects adds a significant hurdle for the development of general-purpose metamaterial technologies. Here, we reconceptualize bulk-scale extrinsic properties as a design opportunity and develop an approach that repurposes them in a new class of exponentially reconfigurable origami-inspired mechanical metamaterials. We illustrate the use of extrinsic properties to design a single general-purpose structure that can be transformed into a variety of passive mechanical devices including a waveguide, a wave lens, and a wave cloak. Bench-top experiments validate the core concepts of our approach and show how unintentional extrinsic effects become useful for applications of reconfigurable metamaterials.

中文翻译：

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具有指数级大量离散配置的新兴可重构机械超材料镶嵌

摘要 超材料是一类经常违反适用于普通材料的常规假设的工程材料。虽然超材料通常由精心设计的中尺度单元组装而成，但预期的批量功能可能会被非可加性单元 - 单元相互作用驱动的意外涌现效应所掩盖。这些相互作用通常对单元的数量和它们的整体布置很敏感，使它们与单元规模设计无关。因此，外在效应的出现为通用超材料技术的发展增加了重大障碍。在这里，我们将大体积外在特性重新概念化为设计机会，并开发了一种方法，将它们重新用于一类新的指数可重构折纸机械超材料。我们说明了使用外在特性来设计一个单一的通用结构，该结构可以转化为各种无源机械设备，包括波导、波透镜和波斗篷。台式实验验证了我们方法的核心概念，并展示了无意的外在效应如何对可重构超材料的应用变得有用。