Morphing soft structures with instabilities
| When |
Oct 06, 2020
from 10:45 to 11:45 |
|---|---|
| Where | Salle des thèses |
| Attendees |
Joël Marthelot |
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Fracture and buckling of slender structures are typically regarded as a first step towards failure. Instead, we envision mechanical and interfacial instabilities in structures as opportunities for scalable, reversible, and robust mechanisms that are first to be predictively understood, and then harvested for function. Three examples will be presented: (1) the rapid fabrication of nearly uniform hemispherical elastic shells by drainage and (2) their pneumatic actuation towards shape morphing applications, (3) harnessing Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities in liquid elastomeric coating to spontaneously fabricate solid structures. The main common feature underlying these various problems is the prominence of geometry, and its interplay with mechanics, in dictating complex mechanical behavior that is relevant and applicable over a wide range of length scales.