Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

Ph.D. Thesis Defense

Abstract: Natural biomaterials, e.g. shells, bone, and wood, are typically comprised of hard and soft constituent materials that are hierarchically ordered to achieve mechanical resilience, light weight, and multifunctionality. Advanced fabrication techniques have enabled the creation of precisely architected materials with exceptional mechanical properties unattainable by their constituent materials, yet they are often designed with fully interconnected structural members whose junctions are detrimental to their performance because they serve as stress concentrations for damage accumulation and lower mechanical resilience. Most studies have also focused on understanding the stretching, bending, and buckling of the structural members, while explorations toward contact interactions within structural members remain limited. We address these challenges by (i) introducing a new three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical architecture in which fibers are interwoven to construct effective beams, (ii) introducing the concept of knots into the hierarchical architecture framework, and (iii) developing a model to study the effects of structural element length scale on the energy dissipation capability of a frictional architected material.

We first explore the effective lattice response of hierarchical woven microlattices, and we demonstrate the superior ability of woven architectures to achieve high tensile and compressive strains via smooth reconfiguration of woven microfibers in the effective beams and junctions without failure events. We study how fiber topology and constituent materials influence the mechanical behaviors of hierarchical intertwined structures, and we compare our results with theory. Our study reveals that knot topology allows a new regime of deformation capable of shape-retention, leading to increased absorbed energy and failure strain compared to structures with woven topology. Agreements between experimental results and a model for long overhand knots suggest that the model can aid the optimization of the mechanical performance of microwoven materials. We then adapt classical contact mechanics and adhesion models to explore the influence of the size of structural elements in a frictional architected material on its energy dissipation capability. Our model shows that the energy dissipation capability of our frictional architected material can be significantly increased when it is scaled down from the mm-scale to the sub-micron length scale.

Our woven hierarchical design offers a pathway to make traditionally stiff and brittle materials more deformable and introduces a new building block for 3D architected materials with complex nonlinear mechanics. The unique tightening mechanism introduced by knotted topology unlocks new ways to create shape-reconfigurable, highly extensible, and extremely energy-absorbing bulk, 3D architected materials with mechanical properties that can be tuned not only by their geometries and bulk properties, but also by the surface interactions experienced by the structural elements. Lastly, our modeling work shows the potential of creating highly dissipative architected materials with shape-retention capability via carefully architected structural elements.

Zoom: https://caltech.zoom.us/j/83009815690

NOTE: At this time, in-person Mechanical and Civil Engineering Lectures are open to all Caltech students/staff/faculty/visitors with a valid Caltech ID.