Research Projects

1. Mechanical Metamaterials

Metamaterials are artificial materials of tailored micro-structured functional building blocks (or "meta-atoms") with built-in mechanisms, often arranged into a 3D crystalline order. Metamaterials enable effective material properties that go quantitatively and qualitatively beyond ("meta") those of ordinary materials known from nature.

As part of the Virtual Materials Design (VirtMat) project, our group focuses on the characterization and optimization of chiral mechanical metamaterials. These materials exhibit, for example, a twist as a response to an extension – a deformation mode which is forbidden in classical "Cauchy" continuum mechanics. Areas of interest are:

• Limits of chiral mechanical metamaterials
• Bistable and graded metamaterials
• Programmable metamaterials

2. Nano-Glasses

We study the structure and properties of nano-glasses by atomistic simulations.

• In almost all tribological systems, glassy surface layers occur after some   friction. We study the possible glass formation from crystalline solid mechanics under extremely large strains on the CuZr system.

• For comparison we also study the formation of amorphous SiO₂ (a-SiO₂) during scratching.