Soft Materials and Structures
Pedro Reis Massachusetts Institute of Technology
preis@mit.edu 6173243325
Xuanhe Zhao Duke University
xz69@duke.edu
Katia Bertoldi Harvard University
bertoldi@seas.harvard.edu
Oscar Lopez-Pamies University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
pamies@illinois.edu
(Mechanics of Solids and Structures)
Over the past few years, soft materials and soft mechanical structures have driven our community into new exciting directions. Large deformations and instabilities of soft materials/structures can be immensely rich, albeit nontrivial. As a result, they offer unique opportunities to design multifunctional materials and devices with novel properties, through the appropriate design of the structural layout. The mini-symposium will address recent experimental, computational and theoretical advances in this direction.
Topics of particular interest include:
• Electroactive and magnetoactive elastomers;
• Liquid crystal elastomers;
• Shape-memory and light-sensitive polymers;
• Responsive gels and Ionic Polymer-Metal Composites (IPMC);
• Soft structures including rods, plates, shells and biological structures;
• Geometric and material instabilities;
• Foldable and deployable structures.