Title:

Intelligent Soft Composites with Integrated Multiphysics Responses

Speaker:

Dr. Renee Zhao

Affiliation:

The Ohio State University

When:

Thursday, February 6, 2020 at 11:00:00 AM   Add to Calendar

Where:

Love Building, Room 109

Host:

Dr. Ting Zhu
ting.zhu@me.gatech.edu
(404) 894-6597

Abstract

Intelligent materials are artificially designed materials that can respond to external stimuli such as temperature, stress, pH, electric or magnetic fields, and change their shapes, properties, and functions in programmed manners. Recently, designs and fabrications of soft intelligent materials have attracted great interest in the research communities due to the increasing demand for smart, programmable materials that can be easily controlled to achieve complex functionalities for applications in soft robotics, morphing structures, and biomedical devices. However, it is still a great challenge to design and fabricate high performance multifunctional intelligent materials for advanced engineering applications, due to the lack of design guidance at the levels of material, fabrication, and stimulation. In this talk, we present our recent works on the design, fabrication, and mechanics of hard-magnetic soft materials, which use hard-magnetic particles to drive the shape change of soft material matrix and to obtain their functionality. A multiphysics constitutive model and its finite-element implementation that captures the magneto-mechanical responses of the composites are discussed. A mechanics-machine learning guided methodology is then used to achieve the design of controlled actuation for applications such as metamaterials and biomimetic soft robots. In addition, recent development of magnetic shape memory polymers with integrated shape manipulation to overcome the limitation of current soft active materials is introduced. Finally, we briefly discuss our future work on intelligent material systems.

Biography

Renee Zhao is currently an Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University. She received her PhD degree in solid mechanics from Brown University in 2016. She was a postdoc associate at MIT during 2016-2018 prior to joining OSU in August 2018. Her research is focused on the mechanics-guided design of functional soft composites with integrated multiphysics responses. She is a recipient of the ASME Haythornthwaite Research Initiation Award (2018).

Notes

Refreshments will be served.