Seminar: Nature’s Multiscale Design Strategies and Additive Manufacturing

Recent discoveries in seashells unveil that nature uses multiscale design strategies to achieve exceptional mechanical properties which are still beyond the reach of many engineering materials. The multiscale hierarchical structure, ranging from micro lamellae down to nanoparticles, renders seashells multilevel strengthening and toughening mechanisms such as crack deflection, interlocking, lamellae’s deformability, biopolymer’s viscosity, nanoparticle rotation, deformation twining in nanoparticles, and amorphization, jointly contributing to seashell’s ultra-high mechanical robustness. To realize nature’s performance in engineering materials, we need to intelligently design and select materials. This talk will present several case studies in which nature’s multiscale design strategies and materials selection principles are applied through additive manufacturing.   

About the Speaker

Xiaodong (Chris) Li is a Rolls-Royce Commonwealth Professor and the graduate director in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Virginia. He is an ASME Fellow and a SEM Fellow. His research expertise and interests include (but not limited to) biological and bio-inspired materials, biomechanics, biomass-derived energy storage, nanomechanics, surface engineering, and tribology. He has published over 230 peer-reviewed journal articles including Science, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Nano Letters, Physical Review Letters, Acta Materialia, Acta Biomaterialia, Physical Review B, and Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids. His publications have been cited over 10,580 times with H-index of 50. He has received several awards including the TMS MPMD Distinguished Scientist/Engineer Award (2015) and the Professional Engineering Publisher´s PE Prize (2008). His breakthrough work has been featured by Science Daily, Discovery News, BBC, and MSNBC. His innovation was selected by New York Times – Year in Ideas for Year 2010. He is an associate editor for Transactions of the ASME - Applied Mechanics Reviews and serves on editorial board for ten journals. He was the elected chair for TMS nanomechanical materials behavior committee.

Hosted by Professor Bharat Bhushan