Primary Goal: To understand why nanofoams are tougher than microfoams. We use experiments at the macro- and microscale paired with numerical modeling to understand the physics of why nanofoams are more resistant to cracking.

Broader Impacts: Lighter, tougher plastics means less plastic waste. Understanding why they are tough means we can apply that learning to other materials (like biodegradable polymers). There are many technological applications of these materials from medical meshes to filters to coffee cups.

Primary Goal: Create prestressed tensegrity architectures at the nanoscale. This method would allow for the creation of controllable stress networks within parts.

Broader Impacts: Prestress can be used to control mechanical properties (stiffness of tensegrities) and mechanical resilience (high strength tempered glass or gorilla glass). We are developing a method that can be broadly applied to new materials systems that display size-affected shrinkage.

Primary Goal: Uncover the relationship between toughness and nanostructure. Develop nanoarchitectures that use nanomaterials with size-enhanced properties to improve their toughness.

Broader Impacts: This work creates fundamental knowledge into how materials break starting at the nanoscale. It helps us to understand everything from tough engineered materials to natural nanostructured materials.

Primary Goals: Use origami at the nanoscale to create flexible nanostructured materials. Understand emergent bistability in origami without a soft hinge.

Broader Impacts: Origami provides a framework for flexible and deployable structures. By utilizing principles of origami at the nanoscale, we can create resilient and flexible nanostructures for “smart” materials that can change shape and store mechanical memory.

Primary Goals: Understand how gradient shell architectures can be designed to resist fracture, especially under extreme environments like ultrahigh temperature or shock.

Broader Impacts: These will be used for more resilient coatings and thermal barriers to insulate in extreme environments and protect against mechanical damage. For example, these could be used in combustion engines and exhaust lines, as space shuttle tile shields and as the lining for jet engines.

Primary Goals: Investigate how to better control the pyrolyzing process to affect shrinkage and enhance mechanical properties such as strength-density ratios and ultralight weights through pyrolysis-induced pretensioning.

Broader Impacts: Two-photon lithography can be used to create 3D polymeric structures with control of features at the nanoscale. Pyrolyzing these polymer structures converts them into pure carbon and causes them to undergo as much as 80% shrinkage. This process not only decreases weight and improves feature sizes, but it allows for nanoarchitectures to be made from ultrahigh strength nano-carbon.

Primary Goals: Design and run parametric studies with ABAQUS scripting to determine the laminate stacking for a support tube to house the Inner Detector of the ATLAS experiment.

Broader Impacts: Support the upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) to be able to see the decay products of the particle collisions in experiments to gather more data and observe rare new phenomena.

Primary Goals: Design, model, and test a microscale biliary biopsy thin walled cylindrical prototype tool. Verify the method and magnitude of actuation in terms of displacement and the ability to withstand the cutting force.

Broader Impacts: Biliary biopsy procedure is conducted to obtain cell/tissue samples from the inside of the bile duct to predict the presence of malignant tissues. This biopsy process is performed conventionally by brush cytology and needle with or without forceps. The FlexCut tool may be able to aid in producing the required tissue yield, increasing the sensitivity, and limiting the invasive nature.

Primary Goal: Develop a software tool to predict and compensate drill and fill elongation of metallic and composite airplane wing parts (spars) arising from interference fit fasteners. Validate the compensation with experimental tests and test data from 777x and 787 spars.

Broader Impacts: Enable full-scale determinate assembly (FSDA) of large aerostructures.

Primary Goals: Design and fabricate unique metamaterials with architectures based on the waterbomb origami structure. Hydrogels exhibiting shape memory through reversible cross-links that are sensitive to stimuli and switch between two stable configurations upon the application or release of a compressive force. 

Broader Impacts: Successful replication of this behavior would enable us to use this technology in stimuli-triggered actuation, drug delivery, and production of membranes with variable permeability.

Primary Goal: Using the anisotropic shrinkage of fiber composites to create shape morphing metamaterials.

Broader Impacts: We can create autonomous shape morphing materials with high strength and stiffness that can be actuated using an external field (like temperature) and don’t need physical actuation. This can be applied for deployable space structures or morphing aerosurfaces for planes.