M. Carton; J.U. Surjadi; B.F. Aymon
arXiv preprint :2507.14130
Mechanical metamaterials have continued to offer unprecedented tunability in mechanical
properties, but most designs to date have prioritized attaining high stiffness and strength
while sacrificing deformability. The emergence of woven lattices—three-dimensional net-
works of entangled fibers—has introduced a pathway to the largely overlooked compliant
and stretchable regime of metamaterials. However, the design and implementation of these
complex architectures has remained a primarily manual process, restricting identification
and validation of their full achievable design and property space. Here, we present a ge-
ometric design framework that encodes woven topology using a graph structure, enabling
the creation of woven lattices with tunable architectures, functional gradients, and arbitrary
heterogeneity. Through use of microscale in situ tension experiments and computational
mechanics models, we reveal highly tunable anisotropic stiffness (varying by over an order
of magnitude) and extreme stretchability (up to a stretch of four) within the design space
produced by the framework. Moreover, we demonstrate the ability of woven metamateri-
als to exhibit programmable failure patterns by leveraging tunability in the design process.
This framework provides a design and modeling toolbox to access this previously unattain-
able high-compliance regime of mechanical metamaterials, enabling programmable large-
deformation, nonlinear responses.