Meta-materials with locally addressable properties: from self-folding to autonomous propulsion

Chiara Daraio, Ph.D.
Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics
California Institute of Technology

Mechanical  metamaterials  are  materials  with  a  tailored,  architected  structure,  designed  to achieve properties that depart from those found in natural or more “conventional” engineering materials. Initial realizations of these materials were periodic and derived their properties from an interplay  of  the  constitutive material  responses  and  the  architected  geometry.  More  recently, developments in the field of metamaterials focused on the effects of disorder, nonlinearities and tunability. This increasing complexity allows material designers to control more precisely local  constitutive  and  structural  properties,  and  harvest  the  richness  of nonlinear  phenomena. Current trends suggest a growing interest in the creation of metamaterials with programmable responses and metamaterials with autonomously adapting morphology. In this talk, I will highlight some of our recent work in the control of stored energy in structured materials, to create programmable, nonlinear metamaterials and their possible application to engineering problems.

Professor Daraio received her undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universita’ Politecnica delle Marche, Italy (2001). She received her M.S. (2003) and Ph.D. degrees (2006) in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. She joined the Aeronautics and Applied Physics departments of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in fall of 2006 and was promoted full professor in 2010. From January 2013 to August 2016, she joined the department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zürich, with a chair in Mechanics and Materials. She returned at Caltech in August 2016, as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics. She received a Presidential Early Career Award from
Presidend Obama (PECASE) in 2012, was elected as a Sloan Research Fellow in 2011 and received an ONR Young Investigator Award in 2010. She is also a winner of the NSF CAREER award (2009), of the Richard Von Mises Prize (2008) and received the Hetenyi Award from the Society for Experimental Mechanics (2015). She was selected by Popular Science magazine among the “Brilliant 10” (2010). She serves as a Board Editor for Science (AAAS) and as an Associate  Editor  for  the  journal Extreme  Mechanics  Letters.  She  published  over  120  peer-reviewed papers, two book chapters and several patents. For a complete list of publication and research information: www.daraio.caltech.edu.