Mentor: Dr. Ranajay Ghosh, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Description: Extreme weight reduction and multifunctionality is key to successful hypersonic flight structures due to the complexity of hypersonic flight trajectories and the resulting aero-thermal loading envelopes. The most successful structural design strategy would combine lightweight, multifunctionality and tunability across multiaxial load regimes. One of the most promising frontier technologies suitable for this advancement are origami architectured sandwich structures. They exhibit striking deformation regimes governed by their geometry and kinematics. Origami structures are inherently lightweight with large open spaces that can accommodate fluids for cooling and storage, sensors and actuators. All properties of origami structures can be entirely tuned using joint properties and fold patterns. However, utilizing origami as core for sandwich structures is still formidable due to lack of understanding of the mechanical instabilities, failure modes and complex architecture-property correlations under quasi-static and transient loads in a sandwich setting. Two origami types are proposed that have shown great promise – Miura and Kresling type. Mechanics models, lab experiments, and finite element (FE) modeling would be the primary avenues of research.
HYPER REU Students will familiarize themselves with the geometry of the origami structures using paper models with mechanical testing at lab scale. They will then learn to fabricate structural origami using 3D printing, with polymers and assemble sandwich structures. They will compare their analytical models with finite element (FE) and experimental results. The loads would include load-displacement, low speed impact, thermal expansion (simulated or real), 3D digital image correlations (3D DIC) and visual data. The models would be used for optimizing weight, elasticity and failure. The faculty and graduate student mentor will guide the REU participant in disseminating the research results. The proposed theory-computation-experiment approach is an excellent preparatory ground for advanced research in graduate school and their future careers.