Mechanical metamaterials built from Chinese characters

This paper explores the use of geometric features from single-component Chinese characters to design novel mechanical metamaterials, thereby opening new culturally inspired channels for metamaterials abstraction. To do this, we computationally designed systematic arrays of symmetrized unit cells inspired by five different Chinese characters. These were additively manufactured and mechanically tested to evaluate their properties against a hexagonal honeycomb control. We find that superior mechanical properties can be achieved from the character 天, which significantly outperformed all other Chinese characters, achieving an ∼60% higher modulus and ∼100% higher strength than the other designs. This character also exhibited the highest specific strength and stiffness. Ashby plots confirm that these characters have stiffness-to-density ratios similar to those of high-performance metallic/rigid plastic foams. Moreover, while the majority of the characters have bend-dominated strengths, we note that contrarily, 天, exhibits a stretch-dominated strength. The variant behavior of 天 is deduced as being a consequence of interacting transverse struts that resist post-loading motion. This paper shows how culturally inspired geometries from certain Chinese characters can be used as unit-cell structures, offering functional mechanical advantages when re-imagined as mechanical metamaterials.