Active Research Projects
Modeling of Smart Composite Structures; Linear and Nonlinear Plate Theories
Smart materials exhibiting electromechanical or magnetomechanical coupling can be used in electronic devices like high performance sensors and actuators. Composite structures consisting of these materials can be optimally designed to exhibit desired electromagnetic and structural properties through a combination of computations and experiments. Here our goal is develop mathematical models for such smart composite structures in different regimes of operation which will be subsequently utilized in device design. (Relevant Papers: [4])
Figure 1: (a) Galfenol (Magnetostrictive material) based composite structure, (b) Magnetic circuit for testing the actuator performance (Ref. [4]).
Ferroic Materials and their Applications
The class of materials called ferroic materials includes ferromagnetic, ferroelectric and ferroelastic which exhibit spontaneous change in physical characteristics around a critical temperature. Multiferroic materials are defined as materials that exhibit two or more ferroic orders simultaneously. Particularly, multiferroic materials that exhibit coupling of ferroelectric and ferromagnetic orders are of high interest for advanced electronics applications. Depending on the dimension of the device multiferroics can be utilized for applications ranging from energy harvesting, storage, transducers (at micro/macro-scale) to logic and memory devices or photovoltaic devices (at nano-scale). Here our goal is to understand the behavior of these materials and develop fundamental theoretical models at different operational scales. (Relevant Papers: [3]).
Unified Thermodynamics Modeling of Coupled Thermo-Electro-Magneto-Mechanical Systems
There is an increasing interest in material science and engineering research communities to design novel materials that can exhibit desired properties. Such an inverse design process could be facilitated through the development of a unified material modeling framework that can incorporate a wide range of advanced materials. Our objective here is to develop a thermodynamics based modeling framework that can describe the interactions between the thermal, electrical, magnetic and mechanical effects in an advanced material and characterize the resulting reversible and irreversible material processes (Relevant Papers: [3], [6]).
