Textile Metamaterials: Design, Fabrication, and Emerging Applications

Abstract

In recent years, advanced materials have been explored to improve the performance of flexible electronics. As conventional approaches reach their limits, Metamaterials, which are artificially created materials with special electromagnetic properties not found in nature, have emerged as a promising alternative, enabling tunable mechanical behavior and wave control. Textile metamaterials (TMMs) have rarely been reported directly in the literature and, despite having ample potential to be explored, the number of works published in the last 25 years on this type of material represents about 0.3% when compared to general published research on metamaterials in the same period. These materials enable unconventional physical behaviors, including tunable mechanical responses, control of wave propagation, and programmable structural transformations. The TMMs have been integrated into flexible systems, enhancing devices through multi‐scale structural engineering. Despite extensive research, textile‐based applications remain limited, accounting for only a small fraction of 25 years of metamaterials work, despite their potential. This overview highlights the emerging field, focusing on the intersection of metamaterials and flexible electronics, especially textile‐based, covering core concepts, recent advances, and applications such as adaptive deformability, enhanced sensitivity, and multifunctionality for next‐generation applications.