Bio: Dr. Pablo Zavattieri is a Professor of Civil Engineering and University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University. Zavattieri received his BS/MS degrees in Nuclear Engineering from the Balseiro Institute (Argentina) and PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering from Purdue University. He worked at the General Motors Research and Development Center as a staff researcher for 9 years, where he led research activities in the general areas of computational solid mechanics, smart and biomimetic materials. His current research lies at the interface between solid mechanics and materials engineering. He has focused on the fundamental aspects of how Nature uses elegant and efficient ways to make remarkable materials and their translation to engineering materials. He has contributed to the area of biomimetic materials by investigating the structure-function relationship of naturally-occurring high-performance materials at multiple length-scales, combining state-of-the-art computational techniques and experiments to characterize the properties.  

CLEVER ARCHITECTURES, INTERFACES AND COMPETING MECHANISMS IN BIOLOGICAL MATERIALS

Nature uses modest constituents to synthesize composite materials with exceptional mechanical properties for structural and impact resistance purposes. In most cases, these materials achieved outstanding mechanical properties avoiding the typical trade-offs often attained by manmade materials. While these materials require modern microscopy techniques to characterize their complex hierarchical structures, most of our learnings come from the way these materials mitigate catastrophic damage, revealing the most important mechanisms and features of their inner structure that contribute to energy dissipation and toughening. Considering the current progress in material synthesis and manufacturing, these new concepts have converged to the field of architected materials.  In this talk, I will describe some interesting mechanics problems that we encountered as we studied some extraordinary species, and how we can translate these lessons learned to architected materials. In particular, I will focus on a few examples related to how the combination of clever architectures, interfaces, material properties and competing mechanisms can promote delocalization to mitigate catastrophic failure, hence, improving toughness and impact resistance without sacrificing other important mechanical properties. Most of this discussion is driven by how we can eventually translate these lessons learned to the development and manufacturing of architected materials.

Prof. Zavattieri is being hosted by Prof. Evgueni Flipov (CEE). If you would like to meet with him during his visit, please send an email to [email protected]. If you are an MICDE or CEE student and would like to join Prof. Zavattieri for lunch please RSVP by Monday, November 4th.