Proefschrift
Counting metamaterials
The ability to count is a property not often attributed to materials, despite the abundance of memory in materials. Regardless of how a material stores information, it is often difficult to retrieve exactly ‘what’ a material remembers.
- Auteur
- L.J. Kwakernaak
- Datum
- 28 mei 2025
- Links
- Thesis in Leiden Repository
In this dissertation we cover the design of counting metamaterials. These metamaterials have properties that go beyond the properties of ordinary materials. Not only do these materials have a memory, this memory can easily be read out. We cover two specific counting metamaterial designs. First, we discuss the beam counter metamaterial. This material is made of a completely elastic and memory-free rubber, that we endow with holes and cuts to obtain counting behaviour. The material contains a number of elastic beams that buckle left or right to retain information and interact through contact. We demonstrate a design strategy to create beam counters that count to arbitrary large numbers, and can be combined to obtain complex memory and filtering behaviour. After which we discuss the twistbuckler metamaterial. In contrast to the beam counter, the twistbuckler metamaterial contains elements that twist clockwise or counter-clockwise as they buckle. With these we obtain cyclic behaviour where after the maximal count is reached, the counter returns to the starting configuration.