MMAE Seminar - Dr. Graeme Milton - Mechanical Metamaterials

Time

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Locations

John T. Rettaliata Engineering Center, Room 104, 10 West 32nd Street, Chicago, IL 60616

Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Graeme Milton, Distinguished Professor at the Department of Mathematics of University of Utah, on Wednesday, March 9th to present his lecture, Mechanical Metamaterials. This seminar is a part of Midwest Mechanics Series.

Abstract

Composite materials can have properties unlike any found in nature, and in this case they are known as metamaterials. Materials with negative Poisson's ratio or negative refractive index are now classic examples. The effective mass density, which governs the propagation of elastic waves in a metamaterial can be anisotropic, negative, or even complex. Even the eigenvectors of the effective mass density tensor can vary with frequency. We show that metamaterials can exhibit a "Willis type behavior" which generalizes continuum elastodynamics. Non-linear metamaterials are also interesting and a basic question is what non-linear behaviors can one get in periodic materials constructed from rigid bars and pivots? It turns out that the range is enormous. Materials for which the only easy mode of macroscopic deformation is an affine deformation, can be classed as unimode, bimode, trimode, ... hexamode, according to the number of easy modes of deformation. We give a complete characterization of possible behaviors of nonlinear unimode materials.

Biography

Born in 1956 in Sydney, Australia, Graeme Milton received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Physics from the University of Sydney (Australia) in 1980 and 1982 respectively. He received a Ph.D. degree in Physics from Cornell University in 1985, and a D.Sc. from the University of Sydney in 2003. He was a professor at the Courant Institute, New York University from 1987 to 1994. Since then he has been at the University of Utah, where he served as department chairman from 2002-2005, and where he is currently a distinguished professor of mathematics, and also a chair professor at KAIST Mathematics Research Station, Korea.

Dr. Milton is the recipient of a Sloan Fellowship, Packard Fellowship, Ralph E. Kleinman Prize for research bridging the gap between mathematics and applications, Society for Engineering Science Prager Medal for contributions to theoretical mechanics, the ETOPIM Association Rolf Landauer Medal (first competitive award) and is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

Dr. Milton works primarily on composite materials and metamaterials, but also on networks, theories of cloaking, minimization variational principles for wave propagation, Fast Fourier Transform methods for computing fields in composites, and inverse problems, among other things. He is author of the book, "The Theory of Composites", has written over 150 papers, and is currently finishing another book "Extending the Theory of Composites to Other Areas of Science". He has had more than 10,000 citations of his work, with an "h-index" of 50.

Dr. Milton has been on the organizing and scientific committees of many conferences, on metamaterials and composites, notably, in 2002 the Sixth International Conference on Electrical, Transport and Optical Properties of Inhomogeneous Media (ETOPIM 6), where was conference chairman, in 2010 the IPAM Workshop on Metamaterials: Applications, Analysis and Modeling, where he was conference co-chairman, in 2012, 2013, and 2014 on the scientific committee of the 3rd, 4th and 5th International Conferences on Metamaterials, Photonic Crystals and Plasmonics (META 12,13,14), in 2014 the Continuum Models Discrete Systems 13 (CMDS 13) meeting, where he was a conference co-chairman, and also in 2014 on the program committee of the 5th International Conference on Auxetics and other materials and models with "negative" characteristics, and is one of the main organizers of the 2016/17 thematic year on the Mathematics of Optics at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. He is currently president of the ETOPIM association.