Related papers: Topologically Variable and Volumetric Morphing of …

When materials are patterned in three dimensions, there exist opportunities to tailor and create functionalities associated with an increase in complexity, the breaking of symmetries, and the introduction of curvature and non-trivial…

Harnessing the rich nonlinear dynamics of highly-deformable materials has the potential to unlock the next generation of functional smart materials and devices. However, unlocking such potential requires effective strategies to spatially…

Shape-morphing soft materials can enable diverse target morphologies through voxel-level material distribution design, offering significant potential for various applications. Despite progress in basic shape-morphing design with simple…

In many scenarios -- when we bite food or during a crash -- fracture is inevitable. Finding solutions to steer fracture to mitigate its impact or turn it into a purposeful functionality, is therefore crucial. Strategies using composites,…

A buckled sheet offers a reservoir of material that can be unfurled at a later time. For sufficiently thin yet stiff materials, this geometric process has a striking mechanical feature: when the slack runs out, the material locks to further…

The rapid advances in 3D scanning and acquisition techniques have given rise to the explosive increase of volumetric digital models in recent years. This dissertation systematically trailblazes a novel volumetric modeling framework to…

Mechanical cloaks are materials engineered to manipulate the elastic response around objects to make them indistinguishable from their homogeneous surroundings. Typically, methods based on material-parameter transformations are used to…

Elastic wave manipulation is important in a wide variety of scales in applications including information processing in tiny elastic devices and noise control in big solid structures. The recent emergence of topological materials opens a new…

Understanding and controlling the shape of thin, soft objects has been the focus of significant research efforts among physicists, biologists, and engineers in the last decade. These studies aim to utilize advanced materials in novel,…

With recent advances in both responsive materials and fabrication techniques it is now possible to construct integrated functional structures, composed of both structural and active materials. We investigate the robust design of such…

Topological states can be used to control the mechanical properties of a material along an edge or around a localized defect. The surface rigidity of elastic networks is characterized by a bulk topological invariant called the polarization;…

Porous structures are materials consisting of minuscule pores, where the microstructure morphology significantly impacts their macroscopic properties. Integrating different porous structures through a blending method is indispensable to…

Metamaterials achieve unprecedented properties from designed architected structures. However, they are often constructed from a single repeating building block that exhibits monotonic shape changes with single degree of freedom, thereby…

Composite materials are used across engineering applications for their superior mechanical performance, a result of efficient load transfer between the structure and matrix phases. However, the inherently two-dimensional structure of…

We present a generic framework for modelling three-dimensional deformable shells of active matter that captures the orientational dynamics of the active particles and hydrodynamic interactions on the shell and with the surrounding…

Soft robotic grasping has rapidly spread through the academic robotics community in recent years and pushed into industrial applications. At the same time, multimaterial 3D printing has become widely available, enabling the monolithic…

Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…

Topological metamaterials unlock confined and robust elastic wave control in mechanical structures. Recent breakthroughs have precipitated the development of 3D topological mechanical metamaterials, which extend beyond the conventional 1D…

This paper presents a density-based topology optimization method for designing 3D thin-walled structures with adaptive meshing. Uniform wall thickness is achieved by simultaneously constraining the minimum and maximum feature sizes using…

Shape-programmable soft materials that exhibit integrated multifunctional shape manipulations, including reprogrammable, untethered, fast, and reversible shape transformation and locking, are highly desirable for a plethora of applications,…