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Mechanics & Materials LaboratoryProf. Dr. Dennis M. Kochmann

Master’s Thesis Topic:

Numerical modeling of lattice shells

Figure 1: An example of a lattice shell undergoing large deformations, from Liu, J. and Zhang, Y.Soft Matter, 5 (2018), 693.

Description:

Lattice materials, i.e. the periodic architecture of microscale truss members into cellular metamaterials,have exciting properties such as high recoverability, enhanced stiffness, or tunable acoustic transmission,controlled through the tailorable small-scale structural design. We focus on a new class of lightweightmetamaterials, viz. complex three-dimensional (3D) thin membranes made of lattice sheets. Thesestructures open promising perspectives for they combine the advantages of the 3D geometry at themacroscale, including structural stability and lightweight, with those of the engineered unit cell archi-tecture at the small scale.

This Master’s thesis’ project will leverage an existing numerical simulation framework for modelingdiscrete beams under large deformations, which has been implemented within the Mechanics & Materialsgroup and which will be used to explore the behavior of lattice shell structures. The two main foci ofattention in this exploration will be the structural stability/buckling behavior and the mechanisms forsmall-scale actuation. The latter involves studying the effects of multi-physics coupling such as electro-or magneto-mechanical coupling or elastocapillary-induced swelling as actuation mechanisms.

Pre-requisites:

Interested students should have a background and interest in mechanics/physics and computationalmodeling. Specifically, programming skills in C++/MATLAB/Python, knowledge in continuum me-chanics, calculus, computational and applied mathematics will be useful but are not mandatory.

For more information please contact:

Claire Lestringant, PhD.Mechanics & Materials

Department of Mechanical and Process EngineeringLeonhardstr. 21, LEE N205

email: lclaire@ethz.ch

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