Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

During the past ten years, we have been witnessing great technological advancements and new paradigms of material frontiers for intelligent material applications. A few examples include the use of optic cables in communication and automotive industries, light weight energy harvest materials in terrestrial and space exploration, and biocompatible heterogeneous materials in biomedical applications. Many such systems are characterized as multi-contact heterogeneous materials (MCHM), consisting of meso-structures of non-linear materials.Due to the complexity of the interacting material behaviour including contact at multi-scale meso/macro levels, numerical tools such as finite element methods are needed to simulate the behaviour of MCHM. Most of the existing work in literature is focused on treating periodic micro-scale levels using homogenization asymptotic expansions. These methods assume averaged macro behaviour at the micro level and therefore cannot be used for meso-macro systems such as those of the MCHM. The current damage analysis of such systems is insufficient and mainly based on trial and error, which undermines their structural integrity and reliability. Therefore, the progress in material advancements and their future discoveries depend on the ability to fundamentally understand the behaviour of such systems and develop tools capable of enhancing their structural integrity and/or functionality.The short term objectives of the proposed research program will be conducted by three themes, focusing on the (i) development of novel meso-macro scale formulations for MCHM using multi-scale modeling and their solution techniques to solve the strong coupling of the meso-macro domains and contact, (ii) development of an evolutionary optimization tool for optimum meso/macro scale structure shape and topology, and (iii) verification, validation and application of the developed multi-scale modeling techniques through numerical and experimental programs.This work should expand the fundamental and in-depth understanding of MCHM behaviour and provide advanced multi-scale numerical modeling and optimization tools towards better multi-functional designs and explore new applications of such systems.This research program has the potential to place Canadian research and industry in a leading position in the development of reliable and lightweight materials with optimized and/or tuned functionalities, covering a wide range of existing and future engineering applications in the automotive, energy, communication and aerospace industries as well as biomedical engineering, which are all vital in today's competitive economy.During this research program, a total of 7 graduate students (4 PhDs, 3 MASc) and 10 undergraduate students will be trained in the area of multi-scale modeling and material characterization of MCHM, highly desirable in academia and industry.