MMAE Seminar - Dr. Chiara Daraio - Metamaterials with Tailored Elasticity and Nonlinearities: From Impact Absorption to Mechanical Logic Gates

Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Chiara Daraio, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics at California Institute of Technology, on Wednesday, October 26th, to present her lecture, Metamaterials with Tailored Elasticity and Nonlinearities: From Impact Absorption to Mechanical Logic Gates. This seminar is a part of Midwest Mechanics Series.

Abstract

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.

Biography

Professor Daraio received her 5 year Laurea degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universita’ Politecnica delle Marche, Italy (2001). She received her M.S. (2003) and Ph.D. degrees (2006) in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. She joined the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in fall of 2006 and was promoted full professor in 2010. From 2013 to 2016, she held a chair in Mechanics and Materials at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. She has won several awards, among which a Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) from the White House in 2012, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2011 and an ONR Young Investigator Award in 2010. She is also a winner of the NSF CAREER award (2009), of the Richard Von Mises Prize (2008) and received recently the Hetenyi Award (2015). She was selected by Popular Science magazine among the “Brilliant 10” (2010). She published over 120 peer-reviewed papers, two book chapters and several patents. For a complete list of publication and research information: www.daraio.caltech.edu