High Performance Tensegrity-Inspired Metamaterials and Structures

New metamaterials, smart materials and structures, and adaptive systems with adjustable behaviour or which use high performance or 'extremal' materials can be applied to bigger structural systems, such as cellular tensegrity lattices with extremal mechanical properties. Numerical analyses justify tensegrities and discrete and continuum models offer two main approaches to the analysis of tensegrity-based mechanical metamaterials and lattices. Two examples of 2D and 3D tensegrity modules and lattices, and potential applications in civil engineering are presented.