CAREER: Exploiting Time Dependent Behavior and Structure in Developing Programmable Materials

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant supports the development of a new generation of programmable materials that can control and monitor vibrations and shock events in real time. This technology has the potential to influence various applications ranging from improving the sensing and monitoring infrastructure to revolutionizing the emerging field of smart packaging. As an example, these materials allow for in-situ modification of the energy absorbing capabilities of systems whose conditions can change over time due to aging and/or due to changing temperatures, and, as such, they can reduce the cost of replacing vibration reduction equipment. This CAREER grant will introduce new mechanisms to program the stiffness and time-dependent mechanical and inertial behavior of these materials. The educational outreach will address systemic barriers placed upon marginalized students, who are often placed in less rigorous mathematics courses, by offering project-based experiential activities to engage students and foster an understanding of the applications of mathematics in a real-world context. These efforts also aim to demonstrates to the PI's research team the importance of STEM outreach with the goal of increasing diversity and inclusion in academia.The research goal of this CAREER project is to investigate the physics, and establish a mathematical foundation, that governs the interplay between topology and nonlinear and time-dependent material behavior in heterogeneous mechanical metamaterials. Applications range from vibration suppression and shock absorption to the development of metamaterials with self-sensing capabilities. This research will fill a fundamental knowledge gap in systematic techniques and theories that conceptualize mechanical metamaterials. The project work will focus on metamaterials with heterogeneity that arises from: 1) an inclusion in the topology of an elastomeric matrix, coined a ``digital element", and 2) the combination of materials whose behavior is primarily viscoelastic with a material whose behavior is primarily elastic and/or hyperelastic. The selective placement /and or removal of these digital elements allows for the systematic programming of a single host structure to exemplify a host of inertial and elastic behaviors leading to a range of dynamic responses when used as a component in a vibratory system. We hypothesize that the composite viscoelastic and hyperelastic materials will allow the host structure to have tailored novel strain dependent responses. The activities will develop the fundamental understanding and establish the mathematical framework needed to exploit these phenomena using the theory of dynamical systems along with analytical and numerical modeling, material characterization, and experimental testing. The resulting framework will then be used to improve the development of metamaterials with self-sensing capabilities.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.