Events Calendar

AME Seminar

Speaker: Robert Kohn, New York University

Talk Title: Mechanism-based mechanical metamaterials

Abstract: The design and analysis of mechanism-based mechanical metamaterials is a relatively new and rapidly growing research area. It studies artificial "materials" that take advantage of "mechanisms" (that is, nontrivialenergy-free deformations) to achieve interesting macroscopic behavior.The relevant mechanics is nonlinear, since mechanisms involve large rotations. While there have been insightful studies of specific examples, some fundamental issues remain poorly understood. This talk will address two of them, namely (a) how to analyze a metamaterial's macroscopic behavior, and (b) whether linear elastic calculations can still be of use in the analysis of such systems, despite the fact that their mechanisms involve large rotations? My talk will start with a broad introduction to this area; then I'll discuss some recent work with Xuenan Li, which focuses on a particular (very rich) example -- the Kagome metamaterial. This system is interesting because it has infinitely many mechanisms, yet it behaves macroscopically as anonlinear elastic material whose stress-free states are compressive conformal maps.

Biography: Robert V. Kohn is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at New YorkUniversity's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He received his PhD in Mathematics from Princeton in 1979, then held a two-year NSFPostdoctoral Fellowship which took him to the Courant Institute. He joined the faculty of the Courant Institute 1981, becoming Full Professor in 1988 and Silver Professor in 2017 before choosing to retire in 2022. Much of his work has addressed problems from mechanics and physics using methods from the calculus of variations and partial differential equations. He has, in particular, studied many examples of energy-driven pattern formation, in diverse systems ranging from shape-memory materials to thin elastic sheets. Professor Kohn's recognitions include selection as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, receipt of the American Mathematical Society's 2014 Leroy P. Steele Award, and being selected as both a SIAM Fellow and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Host: AME Department

More Info: https://ame.usc.edu/seminars/

Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96060458816?pwd=8LmoG2q6vBCQubqqWpcizd2F1bxqsH.1

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 202

WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96060458816?pwd=8LmoG2q6vBCQubqqWpcizd2F1bxqsH.1

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Tessa Yao

Event Link: https://ame.usc.edu/seminars/