Fabricating Three-Dimensional Metamaterials Using Additive Manufacturing: An Overview

Metamaterials are artificial materials composed of special microstructures that have properties with unusual and useful features and can be applied to many fields. With their unique properties and sensitivity to external stimuli, metamaterials offer design flexibility to users. Traditional manufacturing is often not up to the task of creating metamaterials, which are now more accurately and more effectively analyzed than they were in the past. Recent advances in additive manufacturing (AM) have achieved remarkable success, with ensemble machine learning models demonstrating R2 values exceeding 0.97 and accuracy improvements of 9.6% over individual approaches. State-of-the-art multiphoton polymerization (MPP) techniques now reach submicron resolution (<1 μm), while selective laser melting (SLM) processes provide 20–100 μm precision for metallic metamaterials. This work offers a comprehensive review of additively manufactured 3D metamaterials, focusing on three categories of their fabrication: electromagnetic (achieving bandgaps up to 470 GHz), acoustic (providing 90% sound suppression at targeted frequencies), and mechanical (demonstrating Poisson’s ratios from −0.8 to +0.8). The relationship between different types of AM processes used in creating 3D objects and the properties of the resulting materials has been systematically reviewed. This research aims to address gaps and develop new applications to meet the modern demand for the broader use of metamaterials in advanced devices and systems that require high efficiency for sophisticated, high-performance applications.