On Friday 30th June, a seminar entitled “Tough Architected Concrete Enabled by Robotic Manufacturing and Bio-inspired Schemes” held by Reza Moini, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University (New Jersey, USA), will take place in Beltrami Room (Building 5 – piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32). .

Abstract

In the face of climate changes, the world’s growing population, and decaying infrastructure, there is a need to develop stronger, tougher, and more resilient civil infrastructure materials. Nature offers abundant relevant insight for developing resilient engineering materials. Two primary challenges are engineering the mechanics of strong and tough design motifs found in biological materials and implementing their fabrication via advancing manufacturing processes such as additive manufacturing techniques.  This seminar presents a bio-inspired approach for the purposeful design of architected cement-based materials. Construction materials typically suffer from a brittle response and low fracture toughness compared to other ceramic counterparts. Here, we propose engineering several toughening mechanisms informed by nature, into the conventionally brittle construction materials (such as concrete) with a quasi-brittle and ductile response and significantly enhanced toughness property. These designs are enabled by a variety of manufacturing techniques, including additive processes. Layer-by-layer additive manufacturing commonly leads to processing-induced weak interfaces. By harnessing the weak characteristics of the interfaces and materials architecture, we engineer the ability for damage delocalization in the material. This seminar makes the case that additive manufacturing offers the opportunity to harness the role of heterogeneous interfaces, in favor of materials’ mechanical properties. Development of non-conventional automated technologies such as robotic additive manufacturing processes across multiple scales will be presented as the necessary tools to achieve such resilient infrastructure materials.

Speaker’s biosketch

Reza Moini joined the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Princeton University as an assistant professor in January 2021. He is directing the Architected Materials and Additive Manufacturing (AM²) Lab at Princeton and is an associated faculty with the Institute of Materials as well as the Andlinger Center of Energy and Environment. Moini completed his Ph.D. in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University in 2020. His current research focuses on understanding the mechanics of architected and functional civil engineering materials with toughening mechanisms inspired by natural material, and developing new processing techniques that enable them. His work is motivated by the intellectual challenges in mechanics of intrinsically brittle materials and designing tough and flaw-tolerant materials without changing the materials’ composition.