Ian Tobasco – Rutgers University
Date/Time/Location
Thursday, October 31st, 2:00 pm; Hill Center 705
Homogenization of Kirigami and Origami-Based Mechanical Metamaterials
Mechanical metamaterials are many-body elastic systems that deform in unusual ways, due to the interactions of nearly rigid building blocks. Examples include origami patterns with many folds, or kirigami patterns made by cutting material from an elastic sheet. In either case, the local deformations of the pattern involve internal degrees of freedom which must be matched with the usual global Euclidean invariances --- e.g., groups of origami panels move by rotations and translations while the whole pattern bends into a curved shape. This talk will introduce the homogenization problem for kirigami and origami metamaterials and describe our recent results. Our goal is to explain the link between the design of the individual cuts/folds and the bulk deformations they produce. This is joint work with Paul Plucinsky (U. Southern California, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering) and Paolo Celli (Stony Brook U., Civil Engineering).