In this project, and inspired by natural and biological systems which operate at marginally stable regimes, we propose the “novel use of hierarchical, soft magneto-active composites”
to obtain extreme material properties via appropriate tailoring of their “unstable” response. For this to be achieved, an appropriate combination of physics, material and mechanics
knowledge needs to be put together and extended. The importance of this subject to society is related to the potential knowledge that is created as well as the potential applications
that can derive from the present project. Specifically, in the last century, the engineering community as well as common sense has regarded material and structural instabilities as a
negative feature that should – by all means – be avoided during design and daily use. This is not the case in the present proposed subject. On the contrary, by controlling such instabilities
hierarchical composite materials one can obtain novel and extreme responses, which beyond the point that the instability occurs the response remains stable and reversible, thus
making the material useful in a loading range that before has been considered as forbidden. In particular, these instabilities can lead to enhanced roughness (for use in the context
of haptic devices, hydrophobic or self-cleaning surfaces, morphing structures), as well as to significant increase in local stiffness (for use in substrates for cell-growth) or negative
Poisson ratios (for use in acoustics applications). And the novelty in this case “is the creation of such instabilities in an active manner”, i.e. by controlling a magnetic field.
In this regard, the overall objectives of the project are:
1. To fabricate and experimentally study hierarchical magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) with novel nano- and micro-architectures.
2. To develop numerical Finite Element (FE) and theoretical models that are able to deal with the full magneto-mechanical coupling at large strains and at several length scales.
3. To tailor magneto-mechanical instabilities present in such MRE systems in order to obtain enhanced and unusual material and structural responses.
The above mentioned objectives have been achieved to a complete extent during the ERC project and novel directions have emanated towards 3D printing of MREs and modelling of
additional coupled phenomena such as electro-magneto-mechanical materials.
