Title: Soft grains: Functionality through instabilities and deformations

Author (Invited): katia bertoldi, SEAS - Harvard university

Abstract:

Soft materials have traditionally been exploited to design and fabricate passive devices - such as tires, shock absorbers and vibration dampers. Here we show that they are excellent candidates to make active devices, as these materials can substantially change shape and volume in response to diverse stimuli. Soft structures provide great opportunities also for manipulation of sound and light and for a new generation of sensors and electronic devices. Moreover, although instabilities have traditionally been viewed as an inconvenience, we show that they can be exploited to create materials with novel and switchable functionalities.

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