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Advances in 3D printing technology now enable the precise positioning of microscopic material voxels to form complex structures. Combined with emerging multi-material capabilities and printable responsive materials, this opens new…
Shells, i.e., objects made of a thin layer of material following a surface, are among the most common structures in use. They are highly efficient, in terms of material required to maintain strength, but also prone to deformation and…
Protective applications require energy-absorbing materials that are soft and compressible enough to absorb kinetic energy from impacts, yet stiff enough to bear crushing loads. Achieving this balance requires careful consideration of both…
Inspired by protein folding, we explored the construction of three-dimensional structures and machines from one-dimensional chains of simple building blocks. This approach not only allows us to recreate the self-replication mechanism…
The project aims to explore a novel way to design and produce cellular materials with good energy absorption and recoverability properties. Spinodoid structures offer an alternative to engineering structures such as honeycombs and foam with…
Inverse design of high-resolution and fine-detailed 3D lightweight mechanical structures is notoriously expensive due to the need for vast computational resources and the use of very fine-scaled complex meshes. Furthermore, in designing for…
Doubly curved thin concrete shells are very efficient building structures, suitable for light-weight construction because of their high structural stability. In the process of constructing such shells, an efficient innovative flexible…
We consider the standard broadcast setup with a single server broadcasting information to a number of clients, each of which contains local storage (called cache) of some size, which can store some parts of the available files at the…
Mechanical metamaterials made of flexible building blocks can exhibit a plethora of extreme mechanical responses, such as negative elastic constants, shape-changes, programmability and memory. To date, dissipation has largely remained…
Materials that behave like machines, e.g. functional materials that are able to change shape in response to external stimuli (Bhattacharya and James, 2005), often do so by exploiting phase transitions. Shape memory materials and the tail…
Structural colours have drawn wide attention for their potential as a future printing technology for various applications, ranging from biomimetic tissues to adaptive camouflage materials. However, an efficient approach to realise robust…
Stripe patterns are ubiquitous in nature and everyday life. While the synthesis of these patterns has been thoroughly studied in the literature, their potential to control the mechanics of structured materials remains largely unexplored. In…
The advancements in additive manufacturing (AM) technology have allowed for the production of geometrically complex parts with customizable designs. This versatility benefits large-scale space-frame structures, as the individual design of…
3D promises a new dimension in composing systems by aggregating chips. Literally. While the most common uses are still tightly connected with its early forms as a packaging technology, new application domains have been emerging. As the…
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…
Colloidal self-assembly -- the spontaneous organization of colloids into ordered structures -- has been considered key to produce next-generation materials. However, the present-day staggering variety of colloidal building blocks and the…
Architected materials achieve unique mechanical properties through precisely engineered microstructures that minimize material usage. However, a key challenge of low-density materials is balancing high stiffness with stable deformability up…
Airships, best recognized for their unique quality of payload/energy ratio, present a fascinating challenge for the field of engineering. Their construction and operation require a delicate balance of materials and rules, making them a…
Vacuum-forming is a common manufacturing technique for constructing thin plastic shell products by pressing heated plastic sheets onto a mold using atmospheric pressure. Vacuum-forming is ubiquitous in packaging and casing products in…
Imagine a world where beauty and technology move in perfect harmony, revealing tiny masterpieces hidden in the water. This world is Nature, and diatoms are the stars. Masters of assembling complex hierarchical glass structures, these…