Session: Rising Stars of Mechanical Engineering Celebration & Showcase

Paper Number: 148193

148193 - Buckling-Enabled Deployable Aerodynamic Surfaces 

Certain biological creatures attain superior functionalities by rapid and extensive shape change of their thin bodily features. Earwigs, for instance, fold their wings to a fraction of the fully open size to switch from flying to crawling through tiny spaces, putting them among the most agile species in the animal kingdom. The dramatic shape reconfiguration is enabled by buckling and presents transformative potential for a variety of adaptive systems ranging from small medical robots to large deployable spacecraft. However, the current paradigm focuses on elastic structures with uniformly curved geometries, resulting in highly limited achievable shapes, motions, and stiffness. This paper looks at the fundamental nonlinear mechanics of snapping instabilities of thin-shell structures with non-uniformly curved geometry. Specifically, open-section aerodynamic surfaces, which have applications in novel deployable aerial vehicle concepts, will be studied.

Presenting Author: Kawai Kwok Purdue University

Presenting Author Biography: Kawai Kwok is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University. Prior to joining Purdue, he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the university of Central Florida. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the NASA Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Achievement for Engineering award. His research interests are in deployable structures, multifunctional composites, agile manufacturing, and new spacecraft and aircraft concepts.

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