Flexible Mechanical Metamaterials: Challenges and Opportunities
Visiting speaker
Katia Bertoldi
William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Past Talk
In-person talk
Friday
Jun 16, 2023
Watch video
2:00 pm
EST
Virtual
177 Huntington Ave.
11th floor
11th floor
Devon House
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
Mechanical metamaterials exhibit properties and functionalities that cannot be realized in conventional materials. Originally, the field focused on achieving unusual (zero or negative) values for familiar mechanical parameters, such as density, Poisson’s ratio, or compressibility, but more recently, new classes of metamaterials — including shape-morphing and nonlinear metamaterials — have emerged. These materials exhibit exotic functionalities, such as pattern and shape transformations in response to mechanical forces, unidirectional guiding of motion and waves, and reprogrammable stiffness or dissipation. In this talk, I identify the design principles leading to these properties and discuss, in particular, metamaterials harnessing instabilities and frustration, and their unusual properties.
About the speaker
About the speaker
Katia Bertoldi is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She earned master's degrees from Trento University (Italy) in 2002 and Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) in 2003, majoring in Structural Engineering Mechanics. Upon earning a PhD in Mechanics of Materials and Structures from Trento University in 2006, Katia joined the group of Mary Boyce at MIT as a postdoc. In 2008, she moved to the University of Twente (the Netherlands), where she was an Assistant Professor in the faculty of Engineering Technology. In 2010, Katia joined the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, and established a group studying the mechanics of materials and structures. She is the recipient of the NSF Career Award 2011 and the ASME's 2014 Hughes Young Investigator Award. She serves as Editor for the journals Extreme Mechanics Letters and New Journal of Physics. She has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers and several patents. For a complete list of publications and research information: https://bertoldi.seas.harvard.edu/. Dr. Bertoldi's research contributes to the design of materials with a carefully designed meso-structure that leads to novel effective behavior at the macroscale. She investigates both mechanical and acoustic properties of such structured materials, with a particular focus on harnessing instabilities and strong geometric non-linearities to generate new modes of functionality. Since the properties of the designed architected materials are primarily governed by the geometry of the structure (as opposed to constitutive ingredients at the material level), the principles she discovers are universal and can be applied to systems over a wide range of length scales.
Katia Bertoldi is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She earned master's degrees from Trento University (Italy) in 2002 and Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) in 2003, majoring in Structural Engineering Mechanics. Upon earning a PhD in Mechanics of Materials and Structures from Trento University in 2006, Katia joined the group of Mary Boyce at MIT as a postdoc. In 2008, she moved to the University of Twente (the Netherlands), where she was an Assistant Professor in the faculty of Engineering Technology. In 2010, Katia joined the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, and established a group studying the mechanics of materials and structures. She is the recipient of the NSF Career Award 2011 and the ASME's 2014 Hughes Young Investigator Award. She serves as Editor for the journals Extreme Mechanics Letters and New Journal of Physics. She has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers and several patents. For a complete list of publications and research information: https://bertoldi.seas.harvard.edu/. Dr. Bertoldi's research contributes to the design of materials with a carefully designed meso-structure that leads to novel effective behavior at the macroscale. She investigates both mechanical and acoustic properties of such structured materials, with a particular focus on harnessing instabilities and strong geometric non-linearities to generate new modes of functionality. Since the properties of the designed architected materials are primarily governed by the geometry of the structure (as opposed to constitutive ingredients at the material level), the principles she discovers are universal and can be applied to systems over a wide range of length scales.
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