This is our recent work on the design of fatigue-resistant hydrogel adhesion. In this work, we show that fatigue-resistant hydrogel adhesion can be achieved by anchoring ordered nanocrystalline domains at the interface. This method is applicable to glass, ceramic, titanium, aluminum, stainless steel, and even elastomers including PU and PDMS. We also demonstrate its potential applications as endurant hydrogel coatings for versatile engineering materials with complex geometries.

Chiqun Zhang         Amit Acharya        Alan C Newell          Shankar C Venkataramani

 (in Physica, D)

Defects, a ubiquitous feature of ordered media, have certain universal features, independent of the underlying physical system, reflecting their topological, as opposed to energetic properties. We exploit this universality, in conjunction with smoothing defects by "spreading them out," to develop a modeling framework and associated numerical methods that are applicable to computing energy driven behaviors of defects across the amorphous-soft-crystalline materials spectrum. Motivated by ideas for dealing with elastic-plastic solids with line defects, our methods can handle order parameters that have a head-tail symmetry, i.e. director fields, in systems with a continuous translation symmetry, as in nematic liquid crystals, and in systems where the translation symmetry is broken, as in smectics and convection patterns. We illustrate our methods with explicit computations.

Preprint

Dear Colleagues,

You are cordially invited to submit your one-page abstract to our Symposium 8.3 Multiscale modeling of molecular, cellular, tissue, and organ mechanics for The 57th Annual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Science (SES2020) 

Date & Location:

September 28-30, 2020  Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, MN

Latest articles

Pressure sensors have attracted tremendous attention because of their potential applications in the fields of health monitoring, human–machine interfaces, artificial intelligence, and so on. Improving pressure‐sensing performances, especially the sensitivity and the detection limit, is of great importance to expand the related applications, however it is still an enormous challenge so far. Herein, highly sensitive piezoresistive pressure sensors are reported with novel light‐boosting sensing performances.

This afternoon I gave a Harvard Applied Mechanics Colloquium. Here is the abstract, along with the slides.  The slides themselves just serve as an outline of ideas.  You can find original papers on our group website. 

Dear Colleagues,

Please consider submitting an abstract to the Symposium 15 "Modeling and Design of Architected Materials" at the 10th International Conference on Multiscale Materials Modeling that will take place in Baltimore in October 19-23, 2020.

The deadline for abstract submission is March 1.

Dear colleagues,

A position exists, for a Research Assistant/Associate in the Department of Engineering, to conduct research into Mechanics of lattice materials. The post holder will be located in Central Cambridge Cambridgeshire, UK. There is an opportunity to invent interpenetrating lattice materials in order to design SOFT and HARD meta-materials of any given stiffness, strength and toughness. The actuation response due to seepage of a liquid through the lattice needs to be modelled by making use of experimental results from within the group.

The School of Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, one of the leading engineering educational institutions in Latin America and ranked among the top four emerging leaders for engineering education worldwide, invites outstanding candidates for a full-time faculty position in the area of Multiscale Engineering Mechanics at the Department of Mechanical and Metallurgic Engineering.