CAREER: Understanding and Controlling the Deformation of Thin Rods within Soft and Fragile Matter

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The lessons learned from this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program grant will provide the framework for the active navigation of thin rods within soft and fragile matter, such as granular materials and tissue. Active materials that can bend and fold on command provide advanced engineering opportunities for deployable structures, smart needles, and soft robotic arms. This award supports fundamental research on the mechanics of thin rods in complex materials, and will provide the knowledge necessary to create advanced, autonomous structures capable of actively navigating around obstacles in various media. To assist in the broader dissemination of mechanics, this award supports the development of an innovative program to improve scientific communication and literacy by utilizing online digital media to showcase mechanics knowledge to the global community by focusing on Digital Inspiration, Communication, and Education (DICE). By placing an emphasis on visual, verbal, and written communication, this program will enhance both the scientific communication of the next generation of scholars and broaden participation of the general public through the creation and curation of open, online mechanics content. Steering a structure through soft and fragile matter, such as tissues and granular media, requires understanding the mechanics of slender structures, the deformation of stimuli-responsive structures and the forces that arise from the interplay between the deforming structure and its surrounding media. This award will lead to a better understanding of how a slender structure deforms within a complex medium. First, a quantitative experimental relationship will be developed to describe the bending, buckling, and interfacial penetration of a passive elastic strip within various surroundings, including dry, wet, and soft granular matter and hydrogels. For each medium, this will provide an understanding of the magnitude of stimulus required to bend a structure to a specific curvature. Stimuli-responsive microstructures will then be incorporated into the elastic strip, enabling it to bend and curl in response to pneumatic pressure. The experimental results from this work will provide the basis for important theoretical studies that couple poroelasticity, granular jamming, and the mechanics of slender structures while inspiring advanced, stimuli-responsive structures. The results of this award will help predict the deformation and buckling of slender structures within complex media, while providing a general framework for designing structures that can actively and controllably bend within soft and fragile matter.