Abstract: The rapid advancement in additive manufacturing technologies has stimulated the engineering community to explore innovative material designs that, only few years ago, were considered out of reach. This broad class of materials, often referred to as engineered materials, exploits networks of carefully controlled heterogeneities to achieve effective properties and performance that surpass those of traditional materials. The ability to control both geometric and material heterogeneities, either at or across scales, enables the synthesis of materials potentially capable of on-demand and tunable properties as well as user-defined response. On the other side, the virtually unbounded nature of the resulting design space requires theoretical and computational tools capable of performing exhaustive exploration and analysis of the many possible configurations.
This talk will discuss some recent research from Prof. Semperlotti’s group that focuses on the development of design and predictive tools for engineered materials. Specific examples will be drawn from the fields of topological elastodynamics and fractional mechanics. The concept of topological elastodynamics offers a robust and physics-driven approach to explore the material’s design space for configurations capable of peculiar dynamic properties. The case of an elastic waveguide capable of scattering-immune wave propagation will be presented and discussed in the context of waveguide efficiency and vibrations control. Fractional mechanics, a reformulation of classical continuum mechanics via fractional calculus, is emerging as a powerful theory to achieve accurate and computationally efficient simulations of complex systems that can involve, to name a few, multiscale, nonlocal, and nonlinear features. The fundamental characteristics of the fractional mechanics framework will be discussed and some examples will be presented in the context of numerical simulations for engineered materials.
Bio: Dr. Fabio Semperlotti is a Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University and holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering. He directs the Structural Health Monitoring and Dynamics laboratory (SHMD) where he conducts, together with his group, research on several aspects of structures and materials including structural dynamics and wave propagation, elastic metamaterials, structural health monitoring, and computational mechanics. His research has received financial support from a variety of sources including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and industrial sponsors. Dr. Semperlotti was also the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2015), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program (YIP) (2015), the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) 2019, and the ASME C.D. Mote Jr. Early Career Award 2019.
Dr. Semperlotti received a M.S. in Aerospace Engineering (2000), and a M.S. in Astronautic Engineering (2002) both from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (Italy), and a Ph.D. in Aerospace engineering (2009) from the Pennsylvania State University (USA). In 2010, he was also a postdoctoral research associate in the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. Semperlotti served as a structural engineer for a few European aerospace industries, including the French Space Agency (CNES), working on the structural design of space launch systems and satellite platforms.
