The Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering presents the Midwest Mechanics Seminar Series featuring guest speaker Dennis Kochmann, professor of Mechanics and Materials, and Department Head of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zürich. Kochmann will present “Modeling and Design of Architected Materials.” This event is open to the public and will take place on Wednesday, January 28, from 12:45-1:45 p.m. in room 104 of the Stuart Building.

Abstract

Architected materials (or metamaterials) have become not only a popular solution for many applications that require materials with specific or extreme properties, but they also continue to present challenges for computational mechanics across scales. Besides the need for techniques that accurately predict a material’s properties based on its small-scale architecture (the forward problem), an even bigger challenge are methods that enable the optimization of the effective material performance through a careful design of the small-scale architecture (the inverse problem). We will discuss opportunities for and solutions provided by computational multiscale modeling for both problems. This includes the efficient simulation of architected materials by on-the-fly homogenization and coarse-graining, the design of novel spatially graded metamaterials for wave guidance based on ray tracing, and the generative design of architected materials by methods of machine learning. For each example, we demonstrate how theory and simulations have enabled new design directions for architected materials, and how this field is still offering many challenges and opportunities.

Biography

Dennis M. Kochmann received his education at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After postdoc positions at Wisconsin and Caltech, he became Assistant Professor of Aerospace at the California Institute of Technology in 2011, and Professor of Aerospace in 2016, a position he held through 2019. Since April 2017 he has been Professor of Mechanics and Materials at ETH Zürich, where he currently also serves as Head of the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering. His research focuses on the link between microstructure and properties of natural and architected materials, which includes the development of theoretical, computational, and experimental methods to bridge across scales. His work has been recognized by, among others, IUTAM’s Bureau Prize in Solid Mechanics, GAMM’s Richard von Mises Prize, an NSF CAREER Award, ASME’s T.J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award, an ERC Consolidator Grant, and IACM’s John Argyris Award.