Northwestern Events Calendar

May
22
2025

Complex Systems Seminar: Abigail Plummer: "Rupture,Instability, and Phase Transitions via Constrained Expansion"

When: Thursday, May 22, 2025
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM CT

Where: Technological Institute, F160, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Joan West   (847) 491-3645

Group: Physics and Astronomy Complex Systems Seminars

Category: Academic

Description:

Consider an elastic material that increases in size due to growth or swelling. If the material is unable to expand freely, stresses develop. In this talk, I will present two systems in which stresses due to constrained expansion can generate complex and dramatic responses. First, I will discuss the mechanics of thin sheets that have been locally dilated at a periodic array of sites. When the dilations are sufficiently large, the affected sites buckle either above or below their surroundings. These bistable dilations form a programmable metamaterial, and their behavior can be understood through an analogy to the Ising model. Second, I will describe how hydrogels, polymer networks that imbibe large amounts of water, behave when forced to swell around rigid obstacles. We identify a regime in which stresses due to obstacles cause swelling hydrogels to rupture, tearing themselves apart as they expand. 

Abigail Plummer, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boston University

Host: Michelle Driscoll

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