Pal receives CAREER award to study novel wave phenomena of architected plates
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
MANHATTAN — Raj Kumar Pal, assistant professor in the Alan Levin Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at Kansas State University, has received a $500,000 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program award, known as a CAREER award, to study the vibration response of architected plates for novel wave phenomena.
The five-year project, "CAREER: Guiding and Confining Nonlinear Elastic Waves in Moiré Metastructures," will examine how these plates — called metastructures — can exhibit unique physical properties, such as negative density and stiffness, defect immune transport, and wave confinement in small regions.
"This project will examine the possibility of achieving compact traveling waves called solitons by engineering the nonlinear interactions between two architected plates," Pal said. "It will utilize recent theoretical advances from our students, including Adib Rahman, Tamanna Akter Jui and Sean Perkins. We will use 3D printing to fabricate these plates and conduct state-of-the-art experiments using high-speed imaging and laser Doppler vibrometry."
The findings from this study could lead to the next generation of wave-based signal processing devices for applications in mobile phones and structural health monitoring.
The study could also lead to novel concepts for preventing vibration damage in large flexible structures, such as wind turbines. Vibrations due to strong winds, including tornadoes, are the major cause of damage to wind turbines, which are extremely expensive to repair. The proposed architected materials could replace or complement currently used composite materials.
