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"Extreme Movements in Biological & Architected Structures:
From Click Beetles to Metasurfaces"
by
Ophelia Bolmin
Postdoctoral Researcher | Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies | Sandia National Laboratories
Monday, March 13
2 - 3 p.m.
Weber Lecture Hall 2
About the Speaker:
Generating and sustaining extreme motions is a multi-faceted design challenge. Engineered systems often generate limited accelerations due to their actuators’ force-velocity trade-offs and are constrained by the performance of their constitutive structures and materials. At the interface between structural dynamics, biology, and mechanical design, this talk will delve into how ultra-fast biological organisms use natural springs and latches to generate extreme accelerations and introduce new joining technology. A multi-scale analytical and experimental framework is developed to investigate the governing physics of some of the most extraordinary movements generated by biological organisms, reaching accelerations up to 106 m/s2. Then, architected arrays of engineered latches, interlocking metasurfaces, are introduced to create robust, non-permanent joints for complex surfaces (e.g., lattices). A rapid exploration of the design space across length scales is conducted, leveraging several additive manufacturing technologies, and selected designs are simulated and fabricated to evaluate performance under static loading and vibration. This technology will find applications in broad range of fields from aerospace to micro robotics and prosthetics.
About the Seminar:
Ophelia Bolmin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National Laboratories. She received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from ENSTA Bretagne (France), and her M.S. in Aerospace Engineering and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her Ph.D. research focused on the dynamics of extreme motion in biological and bio-inspired systems under the direction of Drs. Aimy Wissa (ME) and Marianne Alleyne (Entomology). At the Sandia labs, she currently leads the mechanical design and dynamics characterization of a new joining technology, interlocking metasurfaces, under the supervision of Dr. Brad Boyce. She has distinguished herself and her research by publishing several peer-reviewed journal papers, received an international biomimetics award, several travel grants, and the Mavis Future Faculty fellowship at UIUC.