Upcoming Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Optimization-Based Design of Soft Metamaterials

Ryan Alberdi, Sandia National Labs

Abstract

In the last decade a rich set of mechanical responses has been demonstrated in architected materials by treating nonlinear solid mechanics phenomena such as buckling and contact as behaviors to be exploited rather than avoided. While a growing number of studies demonstrate useful behaviors in the lab, deploying components that exploit such highly nonlinear mechanical phenomena in realistic engineering environments has been a challenge precisely because these nonlinearities provide such an array of responses. Making the transition out of the lab requires the development of rigorous design tools that can be used to explore a design space where intuition is lacking.

In this talk I will present some recent work on the use of optimization-based approaches – i.e. shape, topology, and material properties optimization – to design soft metamaterials with tailored and extremized properties. The main focus is on obtaining robustness in both the forward problem solution and inverse problem parameterization such that these techniques can be successfully extended to problems with highly nonlinear phenomena. This is done by casting the search for stable mechanical equilibrium as a minimization problem and using a trust region algorithm to handle saddle points and differentiate between stable and unstable equilibria while accounting for path-dependent phenomena.