Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Adaptive structures are capable of modifying their dynamic response characteristics in a controlled manner to accommodate unpredictable environmental changes. The application of this emerging and enabling multidisciplinary technology is vast ranging from space structures and transportation systems to civil infrastructure, defense and medical systems. The overall and long-term objectives is to cultivate a comprehensive research program on smart material systems to develop the next generation of light-weight adaptive structures which can provide desired functionality by exploiting the coupling properties of smart materials. The proposed research explores the development of smart adaptive structures featuring multifunctional magnetoactive elastomers (MAEs). This is motivated primarily by the substantial and growing interest in MAEs to control shock and vibration semi-actively and to provide soft actuation. Among smart materials, MAEs are truly multifunctional materials as they can vary their dynamic properties (stiffness and damping) semi-actively as well as providing active actuation due to their inherent magnetostriction effect. These unique properties, combined with their unique features such as flexibility, fail-safe, fast-response (less than few milliseconds) and low-power requirement, have made MAEs revolutionary smart materials for the development of next generation of adaptive structures for wide range of applications. The field-dependent modulus and damping properties of MAEs have made them ideal smart materials for the development of high-bandwidth adaptive energy absorption devices. Such novel smart devices can be integrated with structural systems in ground, aerospace and marine vehicles to mitigate the transmitted vibration and shock in the real time under unpredictable environmental conditions. Recently developed MAEs with hard magnetic particles (H-MAEs) have also shown reduced modulus by reversing the direction of the magnetic field which can significantly enhance the control effectiveness of these unique smart materials. Moreover, H-MAEs, owing to their significant magnetostriction effect and low-power consumption, offer enormous potential to become the marvel of technologies leading to next generation of artificial muscles and soft actuators in microfluidic, biomedical and robotics applications. To develop and control MAE-based adaptive systems and structures, it is of paramount importance to understand the dynamic response and functionality of different types of MAEs under varying controlled magnetic field and environmental conditions. These will be addressed through an in-depth experimental characterization and development of high-fidelity magneto-viscoelastic models which can accurately predict the viscoelastic and magnetostriction properties of MAE. The proposed research program will also facilitate developments in new generation of smart controllable magnetoactive materials with improved MR and magnetostriction effects.