Mines researchers contributing to $5M DOE center to design impact-resistant materials

Mechanical engineering researchers at Colorado School of Mines will play a key role in a new $5 million research center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration aimed at developing a new class of impact-resistant materials.

Leslie Lamberson, associate professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Extreme Structures & Materials (X-STRM) Laboratory, is a co-principal investigator for the new center,which is being led by the University of California San Diego as part of the NNSA Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP IV).

The Center for Simulation and design of Heterogeneous Architectures for Performance and Energy absorption (SHAPE) brings together structural engineers, mechanical engineers and computer scientists at UC San Diego with Lamberson’s group at Mines to solve the computing and engineering challenges posed by designing materials with unique internal geometries that give them nonlinear properties not possible with conventional materials.

At Mines, Lamberson’s team will lead the experimental effort to validate and inform the center’s computational models. Using the XSTRM Lab’s advanced dynamic facilities, including Kolsky (split-Hopkinson pressure) bars, high-speed gas-guns, ultra-high speed thermography and optical imaging, Mines researchers will probe how architected metamaterials deform, fracture and dissipate energy under extreme loading conditions, providing critical information to help quantify uncertainty in center’s simulations and guide the discovery of the new nonlinear material designs. 

“If you picture a one-dimensional beam hit on one end by something, we would expect to feel the kinetic energy from that impact at the other end of the beam. That’s how normal materials function,” said center director Alicia Kim, a professor of structural engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Theory shows us that we can build nonlinear behavior into that beam, so that when an object hits it, the energy is dissipated and translated somewhere else and not felt at all at the other end of the beam. This is theoretically possible, but has not yet been successfully realized in high energy, destructive regimes.”

This is in large part because creating a computational model to understand how these materials would behave and determine the optimum spacing and patterning of the internal geometries are  considered impossible. The center will develop a computational topology optimization method which will automatically design and discover new nonlinear materials via both numerical and experimental studies. 

“Our role is to bring these computationally-designed metamaterials into the real world,” said Lamberson.  “By subjecting them to high-rate impacts and capturing their response with advanced diagnostics, we will uncover how well theory translates to practice.  That experimental feedback loop is essential if we want to move beyond digital concepts and actually engineer the next-generation of impact-resistant materials.”

Such impact-resistant materials would have direct applications in the defense and space sectors, but the ability to successfully design materials with specified nonlinear dynamic responses would also have far-reaching applications in robotics and mechanical computing.

To learn more about SHAPE and the materials-related computing challenges the center aims to tackle, read the full announcement on the UCSD website.