A Seoul National University College of Engineering research team, led by Professor Joo Hwan Oh of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, in collaboration with Dr. Myung Hwan Bae of the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS), has developed a new elastic metamaterial platform that enables the free design of how externally applied forces and vibrations propagate.

The team proposed a design principle that allows nonlocal metamaterials—in which forces or vibrations applied in one region can interact not only with adjacent areas but also with distant regions—to be more easily extended into diverse structural configurations.

They demonstrated experimentally that this design overcomes the longstanding issue of interference among multiple vibrations in conventional nonlocal metamaterials, enabling more precise control of the propagation and motion of elastic waves.