Related papers: Embracing Nonlinearity and Geometry: A dimensional…
Energy absorbing materials, like foams used in protective equipment, are able to undergo large deformations under low stresses, reducing the incoming stress wave below an injury or damage threshold. They are typically effective in absorbing…
Mechanical shock is a common occurrence in various settings, there are two different scenarios for shock protection: catastrophic protection (e.g. car collisions and falls) and routine protection (e.g. shoe soles and shock absorbers for car…
It is a common point that "soft" condensed matter (like granular materials or foams) can reduce damage caused by impact or explosion. It is attributed to their ability to absorb significant energy. This is certainly the case for a…
Protective applications in extreme environments demand thermally stable materials with superior modulus, strength, and specific energy absorption (SEA) at lightweight. However, these properties typically have a trade-off. Hierarchically…
Designing materials that can effectively and repeatedly absorb energy from unpredictable directions represents a grand challenge in modern engineering, crucial for applications from vehicle crashworthiness systems to personal protective…
The energy absorption and impact attenuation of low density polyurea (PU) foams (140 - 220 kg/m3) is presented. The stress-strain behavior, energy absorption, cushioning efficiency, and energy return (resilience) are measured at a…
A key feature of mechanical structures ranging from crumple zones in cars to padding in packaging is their ability to provide protection by absorbing mechanical energy. Designing structures to efficiently meet these needs has profound…
Passive transformation of waves via nonlinear systems is ubiquitous in settings ranging from acoustics to optics and electromagnetics. Passivity is of particular importance for responding rapidly to stimuli and nonlinearity enormously…
The design of specified nonlinear mechanical responses into a structure or material is a highly sought after capability, which would have a significant impact in areas such as wave tailoring in metamaterials, impact mitigation, soft…
The ideal shock absorber combines high stiffness with high energy absorption whilst retaining structural integrity after impact and is scalable for industrial production. So far no structure meets all of these criteria. Here, we introduce a…
The uncrewed aerial systems industry is rapidly expanding due to advancements in smaller electronics, smarter sensors, advanced flight controllers, and embedded perception modules leveraging artificial intelligence. These technological…
The complex physics and numerous failure modes of structural impact creates challenges when designing for impact resistance. While simple geometries of layered material are conventional, advances in 3D printing and additive manufacturing…
We study the adsorption of semiflexible polymers such as polyelectrolytes or DNA on planar and curved substrates, e.g., spheres or washboard substrates via short-range potentials using extensive Monte-Carlo simulations, scaling arguments,…
Soft electronics have recently gathered considerable interest thanks to their bio-mechanical compatibility. An important feature of such deformable conductors is their electrical response to strain. While development of stretchable…
Materials designed by nature commonly exhibit functional grading and laminated structures, particularly when intended for enhanced impact protection. Synthetic materials have also found success in exploiting this concept with fully dense…
Compression of soft bodies is central to biology, materials science, and robotics, yet existing contact theories break down at large deformations. Here, we develop a general framework for soft-body compression by extending the method of…
Highly compressible solids, such as foams, exhibit complex responses, including pronounced tension-compression asymmetry. Capturing such behaviors within unified hyperelastic frameworks remains challenging. Invariant-based hyperelastic…
This paper proposes a method to design protective foam for packaging 3D objects. Users first load a 3D object and define a block-based design space by setting the block resolution and the size of each block. The system then constructs a…
The propagation of transverse impact energy in a multilayer packing (in an array) of parallel single-walled carbon nanotubes has been simulated. It has been shown that such nanotube arrays are effective shock absorbers. The depreciation…
Equilibrium adsorption of disk-like particles on patterned adhesive surfaces is studied using Monte Carlo simulations. The surface is represented as a two-dimensional plane with circular adhesive domains arranged either regularly or…