Research

Current research in the group can be broadly classified into five overlapping themes listed below. Click on the title to read more about it.

Constitutive modelling of multi-physics coupling in solids

Some naturally occurring materials such as piezoelectric ceramics and manufactured composites such magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) and electro-active polymers (EAPs) exhibit coupling of mechanical effects with electromagnetic fields. MREs and EAPs are typically made with a soft elastomer base that is capable of undergoing large deformation with a nonlinear coupling of fields. We develop constitutive models to better understand and predict the response of such materials at various length scales. We also develop computational techniques to uncover the exciting new underlying physical phenomena due to this coupling.

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Biomechanics of soft tissues

Soft tissues are extremely complex heterogeneous materials that can undertake significant deformation under moderate loads. We have developed models to study their anisotropic nonlinear response and applied them to analyse pattern formation due to biological growth and the resulting mechanical stresses.

Representative papers:

Instabilities

Large deformation is often accompanied by material or structural instabilities. Traditionally instability was associated with material failure. However, with soft solids, instabilities can be exploited as a design feature to create next generation actuators. Furthermore, multi-physics coupling gives multiple buckling parameters resulting in an entire phase-space of critical points.

Representative papers:


Slender structures: Rods, Plates, Shells

Rod, plate, shell, and membrane models can very accurately approximate a large variety of naturally occurring and artificially manufactured structures. Even after decades of work in this area, computation-friendly models of slender structures accounting for nonlinear multi-physics deformation are not readily available. Furthermore, slender structures are very susceptible to structural instabilities resulting in interesting mechanics phenomena. Our aim is to both develop such models for new complex soft solids and to study the new physics that is possible by performing accurate and efficient computations.

Representative papers:


Computational methods

The highly nonlinear differential equations derived from the above research themes are solved using bespoke numerical methods. Our recent work includes development of methods to solve PDEs with C1 continuity on shells and to solve ODEs with rapidly varying solutions.

Representative papers: