Engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (including the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies) and the Army Research Laboratory have developed a new way to quickly test an array of metamaterial architectures and their resilience to supersonic impacts. Metamaterials are functional materials that contain unique microscale and nanoscale patterns or structures. The engineers suspended tiny, printed metamaterial lattices between microscopic support structures and then fired even tinier particles at the materials, at supersonic speeds. With high-speed cameras, the team captured images of each impact and its aftermath. Their work identified a few metamaterial architectures that are more resilient to supersonic impacts compared to their entirely solid, non-architected counterparts.
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