mechanical metamaterials

Natural nonlinear materials, e.g., biological materials and polymers, are mechanically weak. It has been amajor challenge to develop a nonlinear material with potentialmechanical applications. Here, we develop a nonlinear elastic metamaterial with giant and tailorable-nonreciprocal elastic moduli. The metamaterial is designed with a microstructural axial asymmetry, which activated nonlinear microstructural deformations in the axial direction and microstructural residual moments.

Current designs of artificial metamaterials with giant Poisson’s ratios proposed microlattices that secrete the transverse displacement nonlinearly varies with the longitudinal displacement, and the Poisson’s ratio depends on the applied strain (i.e., tailorable Poisson’s ratio). Whereas metamaterials with tailorable Poisson’s ratios would find many important applications, the design of a metamaterial with a giant Poisson’s ratio that is constant over all the material deformation range has been a major challenge.

We are seeking a creative and enthusiastic postdoc to work at Duke University as part of a collaborative new DOE funded project entitled "FAIR Data and Interpretable AI Framework for Architectured Metamaterials". Candidate should have phd in mechanical or materials engineering, with experience in mechanical metamaterials, the underlying physical principles, finite element simulations, and preferably some knowledge of AI/ML and desire to learn more.

I am glad to present a recent set of papers highlighting the noteworthy properties of 1D periodic waveguides generated by a quasicrystalline sequence. The concept of canonical configuration explains how to obtain a periodic frequency spectrum and why this outcome is connected to trace mapping:  

-->M. Gei, Z. Chen, F. Bosi, L. Morini (2020) Appl. Phys. Lett. 116, 241903 - https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0013528