research

The international research training group "Integrated Engineering of continuous-discontinuous long fiber reinforced polymer structures” offers one post-doc position at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Discontinuous long fiber reinforced polymer structures with local continuous fiber reinforcements represent an important class of lightweight materials. This class of materials has a significant potential for energy savings due to the high specific stiffness and strength as well as the variety of design options in diverse technical applications, e.g., in vehicle construction.

Tuning of a piezoelectric vibration absorber attached to a damped structure

By : Payam Soltani, Gaetan Kerschen, Gilles Tondreau, Arnaud Deraemaeker

Abstract:

Our recent work investigates the extension of the microplane formulation to the description of transversely isotropic materials such as shale rock, foams, unidirectional composites, and ceramics. Two possible approaches are considered: 1) the spectral decomposition of the stiffness tensor to define the microplane constitutive laws in terms of energetically orthogonal eigenstrains and eigenstresses; and 2) the definition of orientation-dependent microplane elastic moduli.

We proposed a computational methodology for generating microstructure models of random composites with cylindrical or sphero-cylindrical inclusions having high volume fraction and broad aspect ratio distribution. The proposed methodology couples the random sequential adsorption (RSA) algorithm and dynamic finite element (FE) simulations. It uses RSA to generate sparse inclusion assemblies of low volume fraction and subsequently utilizes dynamic FE simulation for inclusion packing to achieve high volume fractions.

A special issue of Journal of Nanomaterials is devoted to "Low-Dimensional Phase Transforming Materials" which obtained significant interests in the recent years. This topic covers a broad range of research such as 

In our new paper published on Science Advances, we carefully measured the elastic mechanical properties of individual silicon nanowires by uniaxial tensile straining under both SEM and high-res optical microscope, and demonstrated that high quality VLS–grown single-crystalline Si nanowires with diameters of ~100 nm can be reversibly stretched at room temperature with 10% or more elastic strain, approaching the theoretical limit of silicon.