# 🤖 New AI tool discovers realistic 'metamaterials' with unusual properties

Source: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2024/me/news/new-ai-tool-discovers-realistic-metamaterials-with-unusual-properties

The properties of normal materials, such as stiffness and flexibility, are determined by the molecular composition of the material, but the properties of metamaterials are determined by the geometry of the structure from which they are built. Researchers design these structures digitally and then have it 3D-printed. The resulting metamaterials can exhibit unnatural and extreme properties. Researchers have, for instance, designed metamaterials that, despite being solid, behave like a fluid. “Traditionally, designers use the materials available to them to design a new device or a machine. The problem with that is that the range of available material properties is limited. Some properties that we would like to have, just don’t exist in nature. Our approach is: tell us what you want to have as properties and we engineer an appropriate material with those properties. What you will then get, is not really a material but something in-between a structure and a material, a metamaterial”, says professor Amir Zadpoor of the Department of Biomechanical Engineering.