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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Xinwei LiORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2026 The Author(s). Advanced Functional Materials published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.Nature offers elegant blueprints for lightweight structural and multifunctional materials. Among them, the cuttlebone demonstrates exceptional structural efficiency through a hierarchical septum-wall architecture, where asymmetric walls and septa carry complementary roles. This intrinsic separation of roles enables functional decoupling and inspires a new class of cuttlebone-inspired metamaterials, where geometry alone serves as the primary design lever for programming mechanical, acoustic, thermal, and biological functionalities. This article summarizes recent advances in the design, multifunctionality, and proposes a future outlook of cuttlebone-inspired metamaterials. We classify existing structures into three categories, direct biomimicry, honeycomb-type, and strut-type designs, and summarize their underlying design principles and governing equations. Subsequently, we discuss their respective contributions to key physical properties, including energy absorption, sound absorption, vibration isolation, thermal, and bioactivity. We further present the septum-wall framework as a paradigm that enables functionally decoupled design, permitting independent optimization of the properties governed by the septa and walls. Finally, emerging directions, including functionally graded architectures, anisotropic designs, and artificial intelligence-aided advanced design, are discussed as pathways toward adaptive and intelligent metamaterials. Collectively, the cuttlebone blueprint serves not only as a biological inspiration but also a unifying geometrical principle for next-generation multifunctional architected materials.
Author(s): Li X, Li Z
Publication type: Review
Publication status: Published
Journal: Advanced Functional Materials
Year: 2026
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 30/01/2026
Acceptance date: 26/01/2026
ISSN (print): 1616-301X
ISSN (electronic): 1616-3028
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Inc
URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202530551
DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202530551
Data Access Statement: Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study
