Xiwei and Kunyu attended the annual Machine-Ground Interaction Consortium (MaGIC) meeting on simulation in robotics and terramechanics, organized by Prof. Dan Negrut's lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We are very grateful for the opportunity to present our group's work and to interact with the…

Yuyuan (Lisa) joined us as a PhD student this fall. Lisa holds an MS in computational mechanics from Duke University, as well as a BS in Civil Engineering from the Zhejiang University-University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Institute (ZJUI). Lisa's background lies in computational mechanics and how it may be augmented by AI to understand,…

Enrique's second paper, just published in the journal Extreme Mechanics Letters, proposes an alternative strategy for controlling crack propagation in a piece of (brittle) solid that does not involve modifying the constituent material and thus has the potential to be applied to exsiting structural members already in service.

In collaboration with the Data-Driven Mechanics Laboratory from EPFL, we show in this paper that how minimally perturbed small-scale geometry, when mediated by multibody contact mechanics, could significantly modulate large-scale elasticity in the context of granular (meta-)materials.

We were awarded a SEAS innovation grant to develop coastal protection solutions that are both effective and environmentally sustainable by leveraging the physics of contact-driven shape shifting, porous materials, and fluid flow! We are very grateful for SEAS's strong support for our research!

Enrique's first paper was just published in the International Journal of Solids and Structures. In this work, we test how well the basic (but popular) variational phase-field formulation for fracture can reproduce the basic fracture dynamics described by linear elastic fracture mechanics theory. A simple test we did, but not-so-simple lessons…