The Department of Materials Science and Engineering welcomes you to its 2015 Winter Colloquium Series.
Location: Tech L361, 4:00pm
Bringing Physics into the Fold: Origami-Inspired Mechanical Meta-materials
Tessellated patterns, realistic animals, and curved polygonal shapes are all examples of the beautiful and amazing sculptures that can now be made using Origami, the art of paper folding. This art form has experienced tremendous growth with the advent of mathematical techniques that allow the basic structure of any new sculpture to be plotted out before any folding occurs, and laser cutter technologies that have made it easier to create folds in a variety of materials. In addition to their static properties, Origami sculptures can be designed to have a wide variety of mechanical properties making them responsive and tunable. In this talk I will describe our efforts to bring together artists, materials scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and yes, physicists to make meta-materials base on origami principles. Our teams are interested in making structures with a broad range properties including, tunable mechanical stiffness, mechanical cloaking capabilities, and topological constraints that can be utilized to design switches. The materials we work with range from paper models, to thermally responsive gel sheets, and even graphene. Collectively, we strive to design material platforms that can be used as building blocks for the nano and micro scale mechanical devices of the future.
BIO:
Professor Itai Cohen is obsessed with motion on various length scales. At Cornell, his research has focused on investigating the behavior of microscopic and nanoscopic particles suspended in a fluid, exploring the mechanics of materials ranging from biological tissues to origami inspired metamaterials, and discovering the mechanisms used by insects during flapping flight. Understanding the out-of-equilibrium behavior of these systems and their non-linear response to applied forces remains one of the biggest challenges in Physics.
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