Abstract:Nature uses modest constituents to synthesize composite materials with exceptional mechanical properties for structural and impact resistance purposes. In most cases, these materials achieved outstanding mechanical properties avoiding the typical trade-offs often attained by manmade materials. While these materials require modern microscopy techniques to characterize their complex hierarchical structures, most of our learnings come from the way these materials mitigate catastrophic damage, revealing the most important mechanisms and features of their inner structure that contribute to energy dissipation and toughening. Considering the current progress in material synthesis and manufacturing, these new concepts have converged to the field of architected materials. In this talk, I will describe some interesting mechanics problems that we encountered as we studied some extraordinary species, and how we can translate these lessons learned to architected materials. In particular, I will focus on a few examples related to how the combination of clever architectures, interfaces, material properties and competing mechanisms can promote delocalization to mitigate catastrophic failure, hence, improving toughness and impact resistance without sacrificing other important mechanical properties. Most of this discussion is driven by how we can eventually translate these lessons learned to the development and manufacturing of architected materials.

Bio: Dr. Pablo Zavattieri is a Professor of Civil Engineering and University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University. Zavattieri received his BS/MS degrees in Nuclear Engineering from the Balseiro Institute (Argentina) and PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering from Purdue University.