Congratulations to Liwei Wang, whose paper “Mechanical cloak via data-driven aperiodic metamaterial design” has been published in the latest issue (Vol 112., No.13) of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The significance of his work is as follows: While cloaks have been manufactured for optical, thermal, and electric fields, limited progress has been made for mechanical cloaks. Most existing designs rely on mapping-based methods, which have so far been limited to special base cells and a narrow selection of voids with simple shapes. Liwei et. al developed a fundamentally different approach by exploiting data-driven designs to offer timely, customized solutions to mechanical cloaking that were previously difficult to obtain. Through simulations and experimental validations, they show that excellent cloaking performance can be achieved for various boundary conditions, shapes of voids, base cells, and even multiple voids.