Achievement

This year, trainee Brent Volk's work has led to a calibrating a new model for the large deformation behavior of shape memory polymers. While shape memory alloys (SMAs) are well known for actuator applications, new polymeric materials now coming on-line have the ability to recover from much larger deformations, with new applications such as for medical sutures and stents. The combination of computational modeling and experiment is a central theme of our IGERT project, and Volk's work has led to the calibration of a new constitutive model of which the predictions agree well with measured behavior of these materials for extensions up to 100%. These results are a first step toward a finite-element scheme that may be used to optimize complex SMP structures. He now has two submitted papers under review describing this work. In recognition of these results he was awarded a prestigious National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship for the continuation of his Ph.D. studies.