BRITE Pivot: Tunable Metamaterial Connection for Adaptive Structural Damping

This Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering (BRITE) Pivot award will fund research that attempts to leverage fundamentals of metamaterials to produce the next generation of structural components capable of enhanced damping performance while satisfying strength and motion performance criteria. Metamaterials have gained interest from the research community as advances in additive manufacturing have enabled their fabrication at reasonable costs.

However, most of their applications and demonstrations are at the smaller scales, and very few works have been reported in the civil engineering community. Yet, metamaterials have great potential to provide supplemental damping, while minimizing the use of materials through strategic topological designs. This project will look to establish fundamental scientific and design approaches needed to integrate metamaterials into a structural system to enhance structural damping.

This research project will bring metamaterial applications to larger scales by focusing on high-damping structural connections, implementation of post-fabrication modulation capabilities, and formulation of performance-based design procedures during the topological design stage. The research will also be complemented by establishing a responsive and flexible educational and outreach program based on curriculum development, and by creating a formal undergraduate research program on 3D printing that will combine both architecture and engineering students.

The goal this research is to discover structural components and new structural systems that would be significantly better performing while using less material, and capable of supplemental damping. It is established that metamaterials can be used to engineer structural components capable of enhanced functionality, including high damping. However, scalability of metamaterials is yet to be fully explored.

Thus, this project will: i) study the scalability of metamaterials to uncover new principles and insights on their behaviors at rarely studied larger scales; ii) research innovative structural component designs that will empower structural materials with tailored strength and stiffness capable of real-time modulation to achieve superior performance; and iii) establish a new design methodology to holistically integrate metamaterials into civil structures. Discoveries will significantly improve structural resilience with respect to nature and man-made hazards, and sustainability by reducing the volume of materials required to reach prescribed strength and motion performance.

This project will allow the PI to advance the knowledge base in materials engineering, structural engineering and structural control, and establish his long-term career in smart materials and systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.