Kirigami metamaterials: from morphing structures to soft robotic skins

Dr. Ahmad Rafsanjani

Professor
University of Southern Denmark

Seminar Information

Seminar Series
Mechanics & Materials

Seminar Date - Time
April 24, 2023, 11:00 am
-
12:15

Seminar Location
Zoom only


Abstract

Kirigami, the traditional art of paper cutting, has inspired the development of materials and structures with emergent functionalities. The simplicity of fabrication and versatility of designs attracted researchers from different disciplines to exploit the power of cuts to create flexible electronics, morphable structures, and soft robots with architected skins. Kirigami metamaterials consist of an array of cuts perforated into an elastic sheet, resulting in a flexible mechanical metamaterial with unique properties governed by the shape of cuts rather than the chemical makeup of the base material. This talk presents several examples in which adapting kirigami enabled control over the mechanical properties and morphing behavior of flexible mechanical metamaterials and allowed the locomotion of bioinspired soft robots when kirigami was combined with soft actuators.

 

Speaker Bio

Ahmad Rafsanjani is a Professor at the Center for Soft Robotics in SDU Biorobotics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). He received his doctoral degree from ETH Zurich (2010-2014) and has been a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University (2014-2016) with Damiano Pasini, at Harvard University (2016-2018) with Katia Bertoldi, and later at ETH Zurich (2018-2020) with André Studart, before joining SDU in August 2020. He has received national and international early career awards, including three mobility companies from the Swiss National Science Foundation (2014, 2016, 2018), a Villum Young Investigator award (2021) from the Villum Foundation, a Sapere Aude: DFF-Starting grant (2022) from the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF), and a collaborative HFSP Early Career Research Award (2023) from the Human Frontier Science Program. His current research is focused on locomotion, sensing, and control of soft robots and robotic skins.