| In the last five decades, the world has witnessed not only the rapid advancement of technology but also an unprecedented increase of the rate at which technology betters itself in this constant evolution and setting of further limits. This is very noticeable in the fields of energy, automotive, robotics and electronics. Although the time at which science progresses is much shorter, nonetheless the challenges that modern engineering must tackle are more complex and require sophisticated solutions. As the need for cleaner energy and the demand of higher efficiency increase, the materials science and the manufacturing industry need to keep up in order to satisfy more specific requirements and higher standards. In facts, materials have the crucial task to provide less expensive solutions to the problems of modern applications, e.g.: in the electronics, we need superfast chips that can dissipate heat and conduct electricity very well in our always smaller and more powerful devices; in the transportation industry, we want stronger and more enduring materials but also light enough to optimize fuel efficiency.;One very promising category of materials is the metamaterials. If traditional materials derive their properties from their chemistry (interactions between their molecules or atoms), metamaterials are engineered so that their properties go "beyond" their chemistry and are dictated by their macroscopic geometry and architecture. In this context, it is straightforward to understand how much interest these metamaterials have arisen in the scientific community and why they are widely and intensively being investigated.;In this work, several cellular metamaterials were designed and additively-manufactured out of two different materials through the use of a stereolithography 3D printer. The structures were then subjected to quasi-static, and low-velocity dynamic impact tests in order to characterize their mechanical and energy absorption properties to investigate their potential applications in real life situations. From the results of this work, the investigated cellular metamaterials showed relatively high energy absorption efficiency up to 45% and demonstrated to be comparable to commonly-used materials for packaging such as EPS foam. Furthermore, it was theorized that the performance of these materials could be dramatically enhanced with appropriate post-processing techniques. |
