Project Grant FA95502410189

The Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) awarded the University of Delaware a $3,060,498 cooperative agreement under the ARPA-E program (CFDA #81.135) on September 13, 2022 to develop efficient manufacturing of lightweight composite architected structures for transportation vehicles through September 12, 2025. Under the award, the University of Delaware will lead a consortium to develop and commercialize Composite Architected Materials Processing (CAMP), a...

This $187,220 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University to establish an optimal design framework for multi-functional composite structures. Leveraging kirigami cutting principles and snap-through multi-stability, the framework will expand performance capabilities for composites in aerospace, automotive, and robotics applications. Under the NSF Engineering program (CFDA 47.041), which supports innovation and excellence in...

The National Science Foundation awarded a $216,000 Project Grant to Southern Illinois University Carbondale under the Engineering (47.041) federal grant program. The two-year project will fund research to understand the thermomechanical response of sandwich structures with triply periodic minimal surface core lattice architectures. The university researchers will use numerical simulations and experimental testing to examine how structured core designs, including gyroid, diamond, and primitive...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Integrative Activities (CFDA 47.083) Project Grant award to The Administrators of the Tulane Educational Fund, doing business as Tulane University, provides $224,063 to develop a tough, lightweight self-healing modular panel system that can shield lunar habitats and vehicles against micrometeoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) impacts. The project aims to measure the thermal and flow properties of a polypropylene/carbon nanotube (PP/CNT) composite material,...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $368,886 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant under the Engineering Program (CFDA 47.041) to Purdue University to conduct fundamental research on using snapping instabilities for designing shape-reconfigurable structures. The 4-year project, starting on March 15, 2024, aims to develop theoretical models, experimental data, simulation tools, and new design methods to enable structures that can extensively vary their shapes while...

This three-year, $1,031,012 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at the University of Chicago to develop active adaptive materials inspired by cell mechanics. The goal is to elucidate design principles for soft biomolecular materials whose actuation and shape are reprogrammable, similar to how actin cytoskeleton networks control cell shape and locomotion. Researchers will reconstitute cytoskeleton-like composite networks in vitro and optimize molecular engineering...

This Project Grant award for $313,087 from the National Science Foundation's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) will support a collaborative research initiative at the State University of New York at Binghamton to develop a physics-informed machine learning framework for tailoring the multidirectional mechanical properties of composite materials. The research aims to create a data-driven approach to understand the relationship between material architecture and mechanical behavior, facilitating...

This Project Grant award, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Engineering (CFDA 47.041) program, supports fundamental research into the role of defects in the electrical actuation of elastomers (elastomer dielectrics) and explores strategies to mitigate their negative impact. The $325,555 award to Purdue University, with a period of performance from September 2023 to August 2026, aims to develop insights that could enable the adoption of low-cost polymer actuators for...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a $676,990 Project Grant award under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to North Carolina State University (NC State) to develop a new class of ultralight, manufacturable materials with optimized mechanical and transport properties. The key objectives are to: Characterize and understand the benefits of exploiting local uniformity and hyperuniformity in materials design, Measure mechanical and transport properties to create...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Mathematical and Physical Sciences (CFDA 47.049) project grant to the Georgia Tech Research Corporation (Georgia Tech) in the amount of $330,000 will support 5 years of theoretical and computational research, as well as educational and outreach activities, focused on the geometric and topological mechanics of flexible structures. The research will explore the design and characterization of flexible mechanical metamaterials, which are systems composed of...