Research Projects

Engineering advancements today are made based on heterogeneous material designs to withstand extreme temperatures across various engineering applications and operating environments. Developing energy-absorbing structures and materials, which dissipate kinetic energy during impact or intense dynamic loading, has received significant attention, especially for aerospace and military applications. Recent studies have shown that spatial microstructural variations significantly affect failure and overall behavior in heterogeneous materials. Structural design requires understanding material behavior under varying environmental and loading conditions in civil, defense, and aerospace engineering applications. Aerospace structures must be designed for survivability from impact and penetration threats, which can lead to structural and functional failure of aerospace platforms and potential loss of human life. The protective sandwich structures can be used for tanks, submarines, aircraft, etc. Extreme events such as impacts and blasts are time-dependent phenomena where energy is released quickly. In structural engineering practice, accurate prediction of structural response due to a combination of severe load scenarios such as collision by heavy objects is necessary. During projectile impact, stresses are the driving forces for material failure manifested in various modes of deformation, phase transformation, and damage such as delamination, cracking, fracture, etc. (Fig. 1). From a penetration resistance perspective, it is desirable to spread the projectile's momentum over as large an area in the structure as possible, reducing the magnitude of the reaction stresses and increasing the time over which the impact load is allowed to act. Establishing an optimum structural design method is important to achieve better dynamic performance. However, the current state-of-the-art still needs to include a comprehensive and systematic modeling approach based on microstructural features and underlying physical mechanisms. A significant requirement for defense and aerospace applications is the development of advanced materials and structures designed to preserve functional integrity under impact from various objects like long and short-range missiles, projectiles, hail impact, etc. We aim to increase the energy absorption and dissipation performance of sandwich panels subjected to impact loading. One way to accomplish this is to maximize the damage dissipation energy by stacking energy-absorbing composite material layers. The design and development of advanced, high-performance materials for application in an extreme environment requires a multiscale modeling-based topology optimization framework supporting the design of high-performance materials and structures. Objectives of the proposed research: • Proposes a novel multiscale design and topology optimization framework for composite structures by integrating structural-scale constitutive and damage models. • Accounts for the spatial distribution, shape, and size of fibers to capture their effect on structural performance. • Aims to develop predictive capabilities to accurately identify critical structural and microscale features for optimizing energy dissipation under high-velocity impact. • Experimental set-up development and testing