You're invited to attend

"Nonlinear Dynamics of Mechanical
Metamaterials for Aerospace Applications"

by

Bolei Deng
Postdoctoral Associate | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Monday, April 10
2 - 3 p.m.
Weber Lecture Hall 2

About the Seminar:
Recent advancements in aerospace engineering have introduced unique challenges for materials and structures. To accommodate unpredictable conditions, they need to be ultra-strong, tough, and impact-resistant, while also being ultra-lightweight, reconfigurable, robust, and even intelligent. Mechanical metamaterials, whose properties are determined by their geometries rather than chemical composites, are promising candidates to address these challenges. However, most studies on mechanical metamaterials have focused on either linear dynamics or nonlinear statics, neglecting the most extreme and complex facet: nonlinear dynamics. Understanding the nonlinear dynamics of mechanical metamaterials is of particular interest for aerospace applications, as they are crucial components for impact mitigation, fast deployment, robotics, and mechanical signal processing. In this talk, I will present a general framework for studying the nonlinear dynamics of mechanical metamaterials, and discuss two iconic nonlinear waves: solitons and transition waves. In this approach, the complex geometries of metamaterials are discretized into rigid bodies and springs, and then continualized to partial differential equations (PDEs). The theoretical solutions of these PDEs provide a complete understanding of the nonlinear dynamics of metamaterials, and further guide applications in different fields of aerospace engineering, including impact mitigation, wave control, fast deployment, and exploration robots.
 

About the Speaker:
Bolei Deng is a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is co-advised by Prof. Wojciech Matusik in the Computational Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Prof. Xuanhe Zhao in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He has broad experimental, computational, and theoretical interests in mechanical metamaterials and systems with physical intelligence. Before joining MIT, Bolei earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2021 advised by Prof. Katia Bertoldi and B.S. from Zhejiang University in 2016.