CAREER: Harnessing Snapping Instabilities for Shape-Reconfigurable Structures

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will support fundamental research in understanding and utilizing snapping instabilities for designing mechanical structures with shape reconfiguration. Shape reconfiguration induced by instabilities is repeatable, fast, extensive, triggered on-demand, and consume minimal energy input. These remarkable characteristics present tremendous potential for a variety of adaptive structures and autonomous machines ranging from small medical robots to giant deployable spacecraft. Current shape-reconfigurable structures are limited in their achievable shapes, motions, and stiffness, making them unsuitable for some functional and load-bearing applications. The outcome of this research will provide theoretical models, experimental data, simulation tools, and new design methods for achieving structures that can extensively vary their shapes while maintaining stiffness as well as volume and mass efficiency. The knowledge generated will expand the capabilities of vehicles to adapt in remote and unknown environments and advance the frontiers of space exploration, targeted drug delivery, and robotic systems. For example, reconfigurable sensor and antenna structures equipped on swarms or constellations of small satellites could enable low-cost, large-scale measurements for inquiry in geospace and atmospheric science. The project has an integrated education plan that aims at engaging students in active learning through organically integrating theory, coding, experiments, and design experience in a self-contained course.The goal of this research is to bridge the knowledge gap in stability principles of thin-shell structures with non-uniform curvature distribution and the role of stimulus-responsive material behavior on the overall stability landscape. Accordingly, the lines of inquiry in this project include: (1) Temporal variation, creation, and disappearance of meta-stable shapes due to material viscoelasticity. (2) Programming of multi-stability by thermo-mechanical load paths in viscoelastic thin-shells. (3) Stability analysis of thin-shells with curvature and twist distributions relevant for aerodynamic and hydrodynamic surfaces. (4) Switching between continuous and creased discrete thin-shell structures via control of relaxation time mismatch. The primary educational initiative is to redesign the Solid Mechanics course to enhance learning through coding, hands-on experimentation, and design projects by leveraging student clubs, additive manufacturing, and online computer resources. This project will allow to PI to push the boundary of understanding on stability of active structures and demonstrate the feasibility of a new model of teaching mechanics in the undergraduate curriculum.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.