MIT 3D-Printed Bifur-Circuits Change Shape Without Losing Power

MIT engineers have developed a new class of 3D-printed metamaterial building blocks that can reconfigure into multiple shapes while maintaining internal electrical circuits. The team calls them "bifur-circuits," and they point toward reconfigurable robots, adaptive furniture, and shape-shifting antennas.

Traditional metamaterials are good at mechanical tricks, but adding electronics usually means wires that break when the structure moves. The MIT team solved this by routing conductive material through the blocks themselves. No matter how you rotate, compress, or bend the assembly, the connections hold. The researchers tested the design by compressing it more than 10,000 times with no degradation in electrical performance.

The blocks are printed in a single pass on a multimaterial 3D printer. The researchers also built a companion software tool that generates the print file from a desired shape, so designing a new configuration does not require rebuilding the geometry from scratch.

Potential applications include assistive furniture that adapts to a patient's changing position during recovery, robotic grippers that switch between shapes without rewiring, and antennas that adjust their frequency as they bend. The team demonstrated a chair that flattens into a table with storage and reports its configuration to an external display.

Lead author Marwa AlAlawi says the work expands what metamaterials can do. "If we think of mechanical metamaterials as building blocks, then our work is one way to take advantage of their geometry to embed intrinsic intelligence into hardware," she said.