What Can Chinese Characters Tell Us About Designing Strong Materials?
American Institute of Physics (AIP)
Cultural patterns have an extensive range of structures, so, inspired by cultural geometries, researchers from the University of Edinburgh created and tested metamaterials comprised of Chinese characters. They published their results in The Journal of Applied Physics, by AIP Publishing. The characters with horizontal strokes distributed the load across their neighbors, demonstrating the effectiveness of crossbeams in stabilizing the material and delaying failure.