Multimaterial 4D printing of adaptive and reconfigurable auxetic metastructures

The study explores how multimaterial additive manufacturing can create auxetic (negative Poisson’s ratio) lattice metastructures with tunable mechanical behavior and energy absorption. The authors design auxetic lattices in several multimaterial configurations by combining stiff PLA and compliant PCL within a single architected structure. They fabricate these designs using dual-nozzle fused deposition modeling (FDM) and use compression testing to measure force–deformation behavior, densification response, and energy absorption. They also compare how different material arrangements inside each unit cell (circular, line, and cross distributions of PLA/PCL) affect deformation behavior and reconfigurability. The abstract states that thermally induced shape reconfiguration is enabled through shape-memory behavior of the materials.