Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

Throughout history, the discovery of new materials and the ability to shape them has been the seed for technological innovation. Today, the boundary between structures and materials is blurred, enabling a new way to think about materials' innovation. Materials can now be engineered not only by manipulating their atomic structure and composition, but also by designing the geometry of their microstructure. Additive manufacturing approaches allow constructing arbitrary shapes with different materials, controlling geometries from the nanometer to the meter scale. These new fabrication technologies have enabled the concept of programmable materials, or materials made-to-order, to fulfill specific needs of applications. By exploiting geometrical effects, like bending and buckling of beams or contact between particles, it is possible to design materials with customized deformation responses, controllable stiffness and multifunctional properties. We have constructed new materials that exploit geometric deformations to absorb impacts most effectively, and used bistable unit cells as building blocks to absorb impacts and create mechanical logic gates.