Metamaterials – artificially made supplies with properties that aren’t present in the pure world – are poised to transform each day life. Their distinctive properties are enhancing merchandise from sporting items to client electronics and past.
As a sports engineer and the individual main on health applications inside the UKRI-funded UK Metamaterials Network, I’ve distinctive insights into how metamaterials are enhancing sporting items.
Specifically, they’re serving to to make sport and train extra accessible, inclusive, and safer.
Metamaterials are made with meta-atoms (Figure 1). These constructing blocks have a selected geometry that has been engineered to permit the materials to carry out particular capabilities and have explicit properties. Their capabilities could also be associated to acoustics, chemistry, electromagnetism, magnetism, or the materials’s mechanical properties.
by repeating substructures in a number of dimensions.
IMechE, Unlocking the potential of metamaterials
Metamaterials and sport
Metamaterials sit between merchandise and supplies. They aren’t supplies in the conventional sense as a result of their design is intrinsically linked to that of the product they’re used inside to reinforce efficiency.
The rapid-uptake, multibillion greenback sporting items sector has comparatively low limitations to market entry, making it a perfect house for testing new and rising applied sciences.
As a end result, it has been an early adopter of metamaterials, significantly mechanical metamaterials (Figure 2), as described in an Institution of Mechanical Engineers report on sports engineering.
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Auxetic metamaterials have been extensively explored and adopted inside sporting items. Auxetic behaviour is an instance of a “negative property”, achievable with metamaterials (Figure 3). Materials with damaging properties behave in the reverse method to typical expectations. When we stretch a standard materials lengthwise, its cross part will contract.
Auxetic metamaterials behave in the reverse method, with their cross part increasing after we stretch them lengthwise. This uncommon and counterintuitive behaviour can enhance the efficiency of sporting items. The property is described by one thing known as Poisson’s ratio, which is a measure of the deformation in a fabric in response to the course of loading (power).
Author’s personal picture., Author offered (no reuse)
Auxetic metamaterials can enhance consolation, fit, and impact protection in merchandise equivalent to physique safety and helmets. They exhibit synclastic curvature, that means they type a “dome shape” when bent, which can enhance the match of helmets and knee pads, for instance.
Their enhanced indentation resistance permits for extra versatile physique safety that may nonetheless shield towards concentrated masses, equivalent to from impacts with rocks and studs. Auxetics may management undesirable vibrations, which is helpful in equipment like bats, bikes, rackets, skis, and snowboards. Other examples of sporting items that includes mechanical metamaterial geometries embrace airless basketballs, bike saddles, and footwear.
The potential for metamaterials extends past conventional sporting items. They could assist folks with disabilities and accidents to play sport and train. Potential purposes span braces, prosthetics, orthotics, and rehabilitation gadgets. Because such gadgets are usually classed as medical gadgets, they’re topic to extra stringent laws than sporting items, posing challenges for the uptake of metamaterials.
Other varieties of metamaterials moreover mechanical could carry advantages to the sport and train sector. This contains metamaterial-enhanced merchandise that could actively adapt their properties to suit the motion sample, form, and dimension of the consumer. For these causes, metamaterials have the potential to make sport and train merchandise extra inclusive for a various vary of customers.
Metamaterial analysis in the UK
Metamaterials are engineered to have extraordinary properties that make merchandise smaller, lighter, easier, and extra highly effective. On December 1, 2025, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers revealed a coverage report on unlocking the potential of metamaterials. The report was produced in partnership with our UK Metamaterials Network. It affords a perspective on how we are able to harness metamaterials to drive innovation, strengthen trade and tackle international challenges.
That stated, a number of challenges should be addressed for his or her full potential to be realised. First, the UK should proceed doing elementary analysis to stay globally aggressive on this discipline. Second, adoption by trade is gradual, highlighting the must bridge analysis and commercialisation.
Third, metamaterial prototypes are sometimes made utilizing strategies that aren’t well-suited for mass manufacturing, limiting their potential to be scaled up. Fourth, a talented workforce is wanted to develop and deploy these applied sciences successfully. Raising consciousness, establishing shared definitions, and testing merchandise that includes metamaterials towards agreed requirements are crucial to drive adoption and foster public belief.
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Challenges of metamaterials in sport
Appropriate requirements and laws in sport assist designers, enhance client confidence in merchandise, and assist worldwide commerce. Sports merchandise should typically adjust to security requirements and rules set by sports governing bodies. There could even be worth in having particular requirements for metamaterials, providing unified definitions and take a look at frameworks.
Manufacturing presents one other problem. Metamaterials used inside sporting items are usually made utilizing established strategies like 3D printing, machining, and injection moulding. Because the enhanced properties of metamaterials typically depend on advanced geometric preparations, they are often expensive and gradual to mass produce. This highlights a necessity for environment friendly manufacturing strategies.
Despite these challenges, metamaterials have gotten more and more frequent in sporting items. I’ve solely highlighted just a few on this article, however I might think about that they may develop into much more commonplace in the future. Being in a position to tailor distinctive materials properties to their operate, in addition to making them suited to particular people, makes metamaterials a robust instrument for sports engineers.
This is a very thrilling time for metamaterials in the UK, and in the sports engineering sector, particularly. I’m wanting ahead to seeing this specialised know-how proceed to make sport and train extra accessible, inclusive, and safer.