Additive Manufacture of Metamaterials: a Review

Abstract

As a novel structural material proposed by topology optimization, metamaterials present unusual properties, such as negative Poisson’s ratio, negative indexofrefraction and so on. Metamaterials have potential application in the aspect of wave controlling and stealth. Therefore, it has aroused great interests in the world. Additive manufacturing technology, also called 3D printing technology, is suitable to make structures with complicated geometries. It is a high geometric freedom to fabricate stealth metamaterials via additive manufacturing technology, which provides technical support for the wide applications. The design of structure and the theory of stealth are both mentioned based on the basic theory of metamaterial. Moreover, a variety of additive manufacturing processes for the preparation of stealth metamaterials, such as light curing method, fusion deposition method, laser selective sintering / melting method are described in detail in the present paper. Problems, for instance, the staircase effect, raw material adhesion, thermal diffusivity, dimensional accuracy and roughness occurred in the fabrication of additive manufacturing metamaterials are discussed in order to provide references for the follow-up researchers.

Keywords

• metamaterial
• structural design
• additive manufacturing
• stealth function