Seminar Schedule – Spring 2019
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Time: 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Place: TBD
Mechanics of Squishy Things that can Grow
Tal Cohen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
As the use of soft and compliant materials is rapidly penetrating modern engineering practice, materials are expected to perform at large strains and deep into the nonlinear regime. Although pushing materials to their extremes often exposes unique phenomena and instabilities that were traditionally avoided in engineering, an emerging field of mechanics aims to harness and exploit these rapid morphological changes for design of novel devices. Remarkably, nature has also been shown to exploit instability; a bi-stable mechanism is thought to absorb shocks in our muscles, and growth-induced instability is thought to promote rapid changes of shape and even cell movement. A ubiquitous growth mechanism, in both natural and engineered systems, is surface growth, in which material associates or dissociates on the boundaries of a body. It is the fundamental mechanism by which biological materials grow and is increasingly applied in engineering processes for fabrication and self-assembly. In this talk I will overview some recent work which explores the nonlinear mechanics of growth and instability in soft and biological materials. We will discuss multiple instability modes that appear in finite elastic materials, then we will shift to discuss recent progress in modeling surface growth processes with coupled diffusion.
Bio
Tal Cohen is the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT. She joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2016 and received a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2017. She received both her MSc and PhD degrees at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the Technion in Israel. Following her graduate studies, Tal was a postdoctoral fellow for two years (2014-2015) at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and continued for an additional postdoctoral period at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Her research is broadly aimed at understanding the nonlinear mechanical behavior and constitutive sensitivity of solids. This includes behavior under extreme loading conditions, involving propagation of shock waves and dynamic cavitation, material instabilities, and material growth.
For further information, please contact Dr. K. Ravi-Chandar at ravi@utexas.edu or (512) 471-4213.