Assistant Professor Shelly Zhang has received the Henry Hess Early Career Publication Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This award is given for the best original, technical paper presented to or published by ASME in the last two calendar years prior to the year of award.
Zhang and the graduate students in her group, Mr. Zhi Zhao and Ms. Chao Wang, win the award for their paper, "Tuning Buckling Behaviors in Magnetically Active Structures: Topology Optimization and Experimental Validation”, which was first published in the ASME Journal of Applied Mechanics in June of 2023. The paper outlines ways in which Zhang and her research group are working to manipulate buckling behavior in magnetically active materials.
Buckling refers to the sudden deformation a structural member faces when the compressive load placed on the material reaches a certain critical value. Though historically thought of as undesirable, researchers are beginning to harness buckling as a means of providing structures with resilience and innovative functionalities.
One of the ways scientists are attempting to manipulate buckling tendencies is through application of external stimuli. In the paper, Zhang’s group takes this approach to the next level, utilizing inverse design and a variation of external magnetic fields to precisely tune a structure's snap buckling behaviors, without re-fabricating it.
Using this proposed strategy, Zhang discovered and physically created magnetically active structures that showcase a broad range of tunable buckling mechanisms. She additionally found success in assembling multiple optimized designs together, creating structures with tunable multistability and programmable buckling sequences under varying magnetic fields.
These results not only provide a systematic framework for continued study of multifunctional materials and tunable buckling but lay the foundation for application of such materials across robotics, energy absorption, actuation and assembly mechanism.
Watch a demo of stacked structures responding to application of different magnetic fields: