MIT Multiscale Materials Design Course 2016 / June 20-24, 2016

Spend a week at MIT and earn a MIT certificate. A great opportunity for postdocs and graduate students. Limited number of fellowships available. 

June 20-24, 2016

URL: http://professional.mit.edu/programs/short-programs/multiscale-materials-design 

The demand for high-performance materials with superior properties, flexibility, and resilience calls for a new design paradigm from the molecular scale upwards. This course covers the science, technology, and state-of-the-art in atomistic, molecular, and multiscale modeling and experiment, applied to describe how mechanical properties of materials can be improved. Through lectures and hands-on labs, participants will learn how materials failure, studied from a first principles perspective, can be applied in an effective “learning-from-failure approach” to design and make novel materials. Participants will also learn how superior material properties in nature and biology can be mimicked in bioinspired materials for applications in new technology.

New this year, we have further expanded the lab sessions to three afternoons and introduced more interactive elements, as well as additional work with a new 3-D printing lab that we just set up at MIT.

The course focuses on practical problem-solving computational tools paired with a detailed discussion of experimental techniques to probe the ultimate structure of materials, emphasizing tools to predict key mechanical properties. In hands-on labs, participants will use state-of-the-art additive manufacturing to synthesize optimized material samples via a direct route from computer to 3-D printer. Specific case studies of molecular mechanics, bio-inspired composites, and dynamic fracture of composites and polymers will be presented and carried out by participants in computational labs. Simulation codes, algorithms, and details of the implementations of different simulation technologies, including validation, will be presented, including practical issues such as supercomputing (hardware and software), parallelization, Graphics Processing Computing (GPU), and others. A specific focus is on structural polymers and composites, including innovative material platforms such as carbon nanotubes, graphene, and protein materials for bio-inspired materials.