PhD in Engineering Mechanics

The Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering is seeking a motivated PhD candidate to join our materials and manufacturing (M&M) research team. The position focuses on the development of bioinspired randomly featured materials with enhanced energy absorption. As a candidate, you will establish a hybrid numerical and data-driven bioinspired design framework to develop super-light and damage-tolerant materials by integrating natural design principles. Moreover, this role is offered for candidates who are interested in the research and development activities in interdisciplinary areas—mechanics, materials, and artificial intelligence./nThe growing demand for new advanced materials that can serve a variety of strategic fields—e.g., aerospace, marine, and ground vehicle—has pushed the boundary of material science towards a revolution in developing materials that would offer unprecedented combination of properties such as strength and toughness. Recently, a new type of “chaotic” spider webs—webs that exhibit unique patterns—in Nature has been discovered and its complex energy dissipation mechanism has not been fully understood yet. This project will explore a new design strategy for developing lightweight and damage-tolerant materials by extracting design principles of natural web./nThe PhD candidate will perform investigation on the unique designs of newly discovered spider web in terms of damage-tolerance and the efficiency of energy dissipation. The developed knowledge will provide design guidelines for high-performance materials to meet industrial needs. A hybrid numerical and data-driven method will be exploited in this project to systematically integrate natural design principles into the development of bioinspired materials. Particularly, artificial intelligence will be exploited as tool to expedite the complex and time-consuming process of material design.