Speaker: Qiming Wang, Assistant Professor

Affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, USC

Materials Design via Additive Manufacturing: from Active Materials to Extreme Composites and Self-healing Structures

Designing new materials is a long-lasting endeavor of the materials science and engineering. The emerging additive manufacturing technologies offer new opportunities for designing unprecedented materials. Here we present three design strategies for fabricating novel materials using a state-of-the-art stereolithography-based additive manufacturing system:

(1) Harnessing 3D architectures of active materials. Active bulk materials are everywhere from piezoelectric materials to dielectric elastomers; however, we here show how to tailor 3D magnetoactive lattice structures to achieve rapid, remote, and reversible control of their acoustic transmission properties.

(2) Compositing two extreme materials in micro-scale architectures. Traditional composite industry usually fabricates bulk multiphase composites; however, we here present how to fabricate lightweight cellular structures with two distinct phases to enable unconventional properties including negative thermal expansion and mechanical properties at their theoretical limits.

(3) Compositing two chemical groups in the molecular scale. Self-healing structures may enable a number of promising applications; however, additive manufacturing of self-healing structures is challenging. The primary reason is that self-healing and additive manufacturing (e.g., photopolymerization-based) require different chemical groups. We here show that molecular-scale integration of two chemical groups can enable rapid additive manufacturing of self-healing structures to achieve unprecedented functions from self-healing robotics to self-healing electronics.

About the Speaker

Qiming Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Southern California. Prior to this position, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology working with Professor Nickolas Fang. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University, working with Professor Xuanhe Zhao. He won AFOSR Young Investigator Award in 2017, MRS Graduate Student Award in 2014, ACS Arthur K. Doolittle Award in 2014, NIH-Duke Kewaunee Student Achievement Award in 2013, NIH-Lew Pre-doctoral Fellowship in 2012, and ASME Best Student Paper Award in 2011. He was elected as the Editor (2018) of ASME Technical Committee of Mechanics of Soft Materials and will become Secretary in 2019, Vice Chair in 2020, and Chair in 2021. He has been an organizer of various symposia, including SES mechanics of highly deformable bodies 2016-2018, APS physics of bioinspired materials 2016-2017, EMI mechanics of soft materials 2017-2018, and ASME Mechanics of 3D-printed materials 2017-2018. His recent research interests are centered around additive manufacturing and mechanics of unprecedented materials and structures for applications in lightweight structures, smart materials, water treatment, and antifouling. His research has been widely reported by Science News, Nature News, Discovery, Washington Post, BBC, NBC News, Wall Street Journal, Physics Today, and NSF News.