TAM Seminar Series Presents

Speaker: Nicholas Boechler University of California, San Diego

Host: Prof. Oluwaseyi Balogun

Abstract

New types of materials that respond advantageously to dynamic stimuli have emerged which offer significant potential benefits in a wide range of engineering applications. Within the scope of mechanical (or acoustic) dynamic stimuli, this includes materials such as phononic crystals and acoustic metamaterials whose properties stem from their designed microstructure. With a few exceptions, the vast majority of research on this topic has involved systems with macroscopic structuring that operate at kHz frequencies. In this presentation, I will discuss our group's efforts to study how the physics of such dynamically responsive materials change when the scale of their microstructure is reduced, within contexts where the overall system size can be reasonably maintained. As part of this, I will focus on our laser-ultrasonic studies of self-assembled microscale granular crystals - a material system whose macroscopic counterparts have been shown to exhibit rich nonlinear acoustic functionality - and discuss envisioned future evolutions of such materials, including applications ranging from designer energetic materials to signal processing devices.

Biography

Nick Boechler is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received his B.S. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, his M.S. and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the recipient of the Army Research Office and Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program awards.