Events Calendar

Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Candidate Series

Speaker: Khalid Jawed, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

Talk Title: Mechanics of Thin Elastic Rods: Computer Graphics Meets Engineering

Abstract: Thin rods are ubiquitous in both nature (e.g. bacterial flagella, human hair) and engineering (ropes, cables), from the micron to the kilometer scale, and often undergo extreme deformation. The geometric nonlinearities that result from the deformation process pose enormous challenges to traditional analytical and numerical tools. Moreover, it is often unfeasible to perform experiments at the original length scale of these systems. We overcome these challenges by combining model experiments and cutting-edge computational tools ported from computer graphics. The prominence of geometry in this class of systems enables the scaling (up or down) of the problem to the desktop scale, which allows for systematic experimental exploration of parameter space. In parallel, we conduct numerical simulations using the Discrete Elastic Rods (DER) method, which was originally developed for the animation industry. For the first time, we port DER into engineering as a predictive computational tool and test ride it against model experiments by studying two a priori unrelated problems, at disparate length scales: (1) coiling of rods on rigid substrate motivated from laying of submarine cables on seabed (kilometer scale), and (2) propulsion and instability in bacterial flagella (micron scale). The excellent agreement found between experiments and simulations illustrates the predictive power of our approach. Scaling (up or down) to the original application then offers unprecedented tools for rationalization and engineering design.

Biography: Khalid Jawed is a PhD candidate in mechanics at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (expected graduation: May 2016). His research focuses on the mechanics of slender rods; e.g. fuel pipelines, knots in ropes, bacterial flagella. He attained his Master's degree from the same institution in 2014. He received his undergraduate degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Physics from the University of Michigan in 2012. His career vision is centered around using computational, experimental, and modeling tools to characterize, enhance, control, and apply the material properties and mechanical instabilities to program the mechanical response of structures. His academic awards include GSNP best speaker award at American Physical Society March Meeting (2014) and outstanding teaching assistant award from MIT Mechanical Engineering (2015).

Location: 211

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Valerie Childress