Leslie Lamberson
Associate Professor
Mechanical Engineering
Colorado School of Mines

Polymer foams, a cellular solid comprising of a gas and solid phase, are used extensively for impact protection applications due to their light weight and high energy absorption. One specific application of interest is their use in combat helmet liners to protect service members from Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs), although they are also heavily leveraged in the packing industry, medical, aerospace and automotive fields, to name a few. These protective applications all have the common characteristic of dynamically applied loading leading to high strain-rate material deformation. Typically, polymer foams have low impedance and exhibit strong rate-dependent mechanical behavior; consequently, novel dynamic experimental techniques and metrologies need to be implemented and aid in the development of physics-based constitutive models for these cellular systems in loading regimes of real-world interest. As such, this talk focuses on quantitative microstructural characterization of open cell polyurethane foams and its relation to bulk response, their compressive behavior across six orders of magnitude in strain rates and utilizing a non-parametric formulation of the Virtual Fields Method to extract dynamic material behavior. How these efforts are leading us to explore the design space of microarchitected materials for next-generation protective systems will also be discussed.

About the speaker...

Leslie Lamberson is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering with affiliation in Materials Science at the Colorado School of Mines. Her area of expertise is in mechanics of materials under extreme conditions. She earned her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and B.A. in Dance Performance from the University of Michigan, her M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and her Ph.D. in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. Prior to her faculty position, Dr. Lamberson was a postdoctoral research scholar with K.T. Ramesh in the Center for Advanced Metallic and Ceramic Systems at the Johns Hopkins University. A former Lockheed Martin “Skunk Works” engineer, in 2013 Leslie was a NASA Glenn Faculty Fellow in the Materials and Structures under Extreme Conditions Division. She is the recipient of an ONR Young Investigator Award in 2017, an NSF CAREER award in 2018, and is currently an Associate Editor for the journal Strain.