Related papers: Building the Space Elevator: Lessons from Biologic…
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…
The structural design process for buildings is time-consuming and laborious. To automate this process, structural engineers combine optimization methods with simulation tools to find an optimal design with minimal building mass subject to…
This paper analyzes how medical supplies can be safely transported through eco-friendly means to areas affected by disasters such as floods using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. We compared the performance of different bio-degradable tensegrity…
As inelastic design for wind is embraced by the engineering community, there is an increasing demand for computational tools that enable the investigation of the nonlinear behavior of wind-excited structures and subsequent development of…
Reinforced elastic sheets surround us in daily life, from concrete shell buildings to biological structures such as the arthropod exoskeleton or the venation network of dicotyledonous plant leaves. Natural structures are often highly…
High capacity and scalable memory systems play a vital role in enabling our desktops, smartphones, and pervasive technologies like Internet of Things (IoT). Unfortunately, memory systems are becoming increasingly prone to faults. This is…
Mechanical components that are exposed to cyclic mechanical loading fail at loads that are well below the ultimate tensile strength. This process is known as fatigue. The failure time, that is the time when a first crack forms, is highly…
The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led…
Many mechanical structures, both engineered and biological, combine heavy rigid elements such as bones and beams with lightweight flexible ones such as cables and membranes. These are referred to as tensegrities, reflecting that cables can…
Materials that are lightweight yet exhibit superior mechanical properties are of compelling importance for several technological applications that range from aircrafts to household appliances. Lightweight materials allow energy saving and…
This article addresses the probabilistic nature of fatigue life in structures subjected to cyclic loading with variable amplitude. Drawing on the formalisation of Miner's cumulative damage rule that we introduced in the recent article…
Traditional member-based two-step design approaches included in current structural codes for steel structures, as well as more recent system-based direct-design alternatives, require building rigorous structural reliability frameworks for…
For a given external loading on a structure we consider the optimal stresses. Ignoring the material properties the structure may have, we look for the distribution of internal forces or stresses that is in equilibrium with the external…
Hierarchical microstructures are often invoked to explain the high resilience and fracture toughness of biological materials such as bone and nacre. Biomimetic material models inspired by those structural arrangements face the obvious…
Soft robotic manipulators are attractive for a range of applications such as medical interventions or industrial inspections in confined environments. A myriad of soft robotic manipulators have been proposed in the literature, but their…
Accurately predicting when and how materials fail is critical to designing safe, reliable structures, mechanical systems, and engineered components that operate under stress. Yet, fracture behavior remains difficult to model across the…
This paper examines various ways of improving the impact resilience of protective structures. Such structures' purpose is to dissipate an impact's energy while avoiding cracking and failure. We have tested the reaction of plane…
Initial residual stress is omnipresent in biological tissues and soft matter, and can affect growth-induced pattern selection significantly. Here we demonstrate this effect experimentally by letting soft tubes grow in the presence or…
Theory and computations are provided for building of optimal (minimum weight) solid space towers (mast) up to one hundred kilometers in height. These towers can be used for tourism; scientific observation of space, observation of the Earth…
This paper considers structural optimization under a reliability constraint, where the input distribution is only partially known. Specifically, when we only know that the expected value vector and the variance-covariance matrix of the…