Light, Smart, Crash-Ready: NASA backs metamaterials for safer aircraft

Image from UTA

Breakthrough Announcement

On October 16, 2025, NASA awarded a $750,000 grant to a team led by University of Texas at Arlington to develop additively-manufactured metamaterials tailored for advanced air mobility. The project targets adaptive multi-stage energy absorbing lattice materials for landing structures that combine light weight with enhanced crash survivability.

Why It Matters for Aerospace Mechanical Systems

Aircraft landing structures such as gear and skid systems together with energy absorbers are subjected to extreme mechanical loads and failure‐modes in case of hard landings or on rough terrain. By embedding metamaterials designed to deform in controlled ways, these structures can better absorb impact with less excess mass, which is particularly crucial for air mobility vehicles. The interplay of mechanical design and additive manufacturing with materials science in general will allow mechanism components such as landing gears, struts, and brackets to be envisioned to integrate functionally graded energy-absorbing metamaterials rather than treating material and structure as separate layers.

Mechanical engineers need to consider how newly designed metamaterials change the failure modes, fatigue life, and dynamic response of mechanisms-not just static strength. Second, additive manufacturing enables complex lattice geometries, but engineers have to integrate how those geometries behave under real landing and impact loads. Third, as air mobility platforms evolve-drones, eVTOL, small aircraft-design of mechanisms and systems will increasingly require materials that can do more than just carry loads-they have to manage energy, adapt, and survive extremes while meeting the mechanical interface constraints.