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The mechanical response, serviceability, and load bearing capacity of materials and structural components can be adversely affected due to external stimuli, which include exposure to a corrosive chemical species, high temperatures,…
A dynamic model for failures in biological organisms is proposed and studied both analytically and numerically. Each cell in the organism becomes dead under sufficiently strong stress, and is then allowed to be healed with some probability.…
Advances in manufacturing techniques may now realize virtually any imaginable microstructures, paving the way for architected materials with properties beyond those found in nature. This has lead to a quest for closing gaps in…
The space environment around the Earth is populated by more than 130 million objects of 1 mm in size and larger, and future predictions shows that this amount is destined to increase, even if mitigation measures are implemented at a far…
A crucial challenge in engineering modern, integrated systems is to produce robust designs. Ensuring robust design is difficult because subsystem couplings produce unpredictable response to changes in whole system specifications. Here, we…
Mechanical metamaterials present a promising platform for seemingly impossible mechanics. They often require incompatibility of their elementary building blocks, yet a comprehensive understanding of its role remains elusive. Relying on an…
In many applications of Structural Engineering the following question arises: given a set of forces $\mathbf{f}_1,\mathbf{f}_2,\dots,\mathbf{f}_N$ applied at prescribed points $\mathbf{x}_1,\mathbf{x}_2,\dots,\mathbf{x}_N$, under what…
Musculoskeletal humanoids have various biomimetic advantages, and the redundant muscle arrangement allowing for variable stiffness control is one of the most important. In this study, we focus on one feature of the redundancy, which enables…
Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…
The field of complex self-assembly is moving toward the design of multi-particle structures consisting of thousands of distinct building blocks. To exploit the potential benefits of structures with such `addressable complexity,' we need to…
The escalating plastic waste crisis demands global action, yet mechanical recycling - currently the most prevalent strategy - remains severely underutilized. Only a small fraction of the total plastic waste is recycled in this manner,…
A preliminary iterative 3D meso-scale structural model of the femur was developed, in which bar and shell elements were used to represent trabecular and cortical bone respectively. The cross-sectional areas of the bar elements and the…
Tissue engineering aims to grow artificial tissues \emph{in vitro} to replace those in the body that have been damaged through age, trauma or disease. A recent approach to engineer artificial cartilage involves seeding cells within a…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
Materials that dissipate energy efficiently under high-speed impacts, from micrometeoroid strikes on spacecraft to ballistic penetration in protective systems, are essential for maintaining structural integrity in extreme environments. Yet,…
Communications are realized as a result of successive decisions at the physical layer, from modulation selection to multi-antenna strategy, and each decision affects the performance of the communication systems. Future communication systems…
The failure of a component often is the result of a degradation process that originates with the formation of a crack. Fatigue describes the crack formation in the material under cyclic loading. Activation and deactivation operations of…
Elastomers that can sustain large reversible strain are essential components for stretchable electronics. The stretchability and mechanical robustness of unfilled elastomers can be enhanced by introducing easier-to-break cross-links, e.g.…
We consider the shape and topology optimization problem to design a structure that minimizes a weighted sum of material consumption and (linearly) elastic compliance under a fixed given boundary load. As is well-known, this problem is in…
Safety and reliability are the main issues for designing assistance wearable virtual environment of technical gesture in aerospace, or health application domains. That needs the integration in the same isomorphic engineering framework of…