Negative Poisson's ratio

Auxetic materials with negative Poisson's ratios have important applications across a broad range of engineering areas, such as biomedical devices, aerospace engineering and automotive engineering. A variety of design strategies have been developed to achieve artificial auxetic materials with controllable responses in the Poisson's ratio. The development of designs that can offer isotropic negative Poisson's ratios over large strains can open up new opportunities in emerging biomedical applications, which, however, remains a challenge.

When a solid object is stretched, in general, it shrinks transversely. However, the abnormal ones are auxetic, which exhibit lateral expansion, or negative Poisson ratio. While graphene is a paradigm 2D material, surprisingly, graphene converts from normal to auxetic at certain strains. Here, we show via molecular dynamics simulations that the normal-auxeticity mechanical phase transition only occurs in uniaxial tension along the armchair direction or the nearest neighbor direction. Such a characteristic persists at temperatures up to 2400 K.

A. Rafsanjani and D. Pasini, Bistable Auxetic Mechanical Metamaterials Inspired by Ancient Geometric Motifs. Extreme Mechanics Letters 9, 291-296 (2016).

The Poisson's ratio characterizes the resultant strain in the lateral direction for a material under longitudinal deformation.  Though negative Poisson's ratios (NPR) are theoretically possible within continuum elasticity, they are most frequently observed in engineered materials and structures, as they are not intrinsic to many materials.  In this work, we report NPR in single-layer graphene ribbons, which results from the compressive edge stress induced warping of the edges.

We are looking for candidates who have strong background in mechanics to help us modelling and simulating of 2D and 3D nonconventional textile structures with negative Poisson’s ratio (auxetic textiles). The positions can be Research Assistant, Research Associate, PhD student or Postdoctoral Fellow depending on applicant’s previous experience.