Contact-free optical metrology for energy-efficient manufacturing of mechanical metamaterials (Phase II)

Mechanical metamaterials are a class of advanced materials that use repeated three-dimensional geometric patterns to endow common materials with new, enhanced, and superior material properties. The “meta” in “metamaterials” refers to the geometric pattern, while the “material” can be a metal, polymer, ceramic, etc. Our expertise focuses on the design and production of mechanical metamaterials for lightweight high-strength sandwich panels that outperform comparable foam and honeycomb materials. The success of this advanced materials technology comes from our ability to engineer how physical properties scale with the “effective density” by modifying the underlying geometric pattern, allowing for low-density high-strength composite panel structures. In our SBIR Phase I effort, we established the feasibility of using contact-free optical metrology to manufacture metamaterial-enhanced panel cores by thermoforming recycled PETG plastic sheets efficiently with scalable methods. Our results demonstrated a quantitative connection between material properties (performance), cost (cycle time, energy consumption), and quality metrics (non destructive photoelastic imaging). In this Phase II effort, we seek to scale up our R&D-scale polariscope for integration with production equipment. This requires both automating equipment and software developed during Phase I. Phase II seeks to pilot the technology through our domestic and geographically distributed contract manufacturing supply chain.