Katie Matlack Manipulating Mechanical Waves 14Dec2021

Manipulating Mechanical Waves in Materials

Katie Matlack

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

December 14, 2021

Abstract:

The Wave Propagation and Metamaterials Lab at UIUC seeks to uncover fundamental relationships between structure and mechanical wave propagation, focusing on phononic materials, where we design new structures to control wave propagation, and ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation (NDE), where we seek to identify unique wave responses in materials and structures to interrogate damage. Phononic materials can manipulate and control mechanical wave propagation through careful engineering of their meso- and micro-scale structural components. Features such as spatial periodicity of the material or geometry, resonant inclusions, and nonlinear features can lead to wave propagation properties not found in natural materials, such as band gaps, localized modes, prescribed energy transfer, and topologically-protected modes. This presentation will first discuss our group’s recent research in phononic materials, focusing on geometric effects and nonlinearity on phononic material properties, using reduced-order models, finite element simulations, and experiments. These phononic materials have applications as passive vibration mitigators and isolators that may be of interest to the joint community.

In a separate yet related field, ultrasonic NDE techniques track ultrasonic responses in damaged materials – such as wave velocity, attenuation, and nonlinearity – to characterize damage across multiple length scales. Wave velocity and attenuation can give information on microcracks, texture, and porosity in materials, whereas nonlinearity is related to nano-scale features related to dislocation-based damage. The second part of the presentation will briefly discuss our recent research on ultrasonic NDE, with applications to early-stage classical and rolling contact fatigue.

Biography:

Katie Matlack is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she leads the Wave Propagation and Metamaterials laboratory. She received her degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT (S.B. 2004) and Georgia Tech (M.S. 2013, Ph.D. 2014) and was an ETH Postdoctoral Fellow at ETH Zurich (2014-2016). Her research focuses on understanding how mechanical waves propagate in complex materials over several length scales and then uses this knowledge to design new and multi-functional materials, structures, and devices. She is a recipient of Young Investigator Program Awards from both the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Army Research Office and the NSF CAREER award. She currently serves as Associate Editor for Wave Motion and the Journal of Nondestructive Evaluation.