SCHOOL OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SEMINAR Monday, May 21, 2012 at 15:00 Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering, Room 206

The Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Many natural structures are made of soft tissue that undergoes complicated continuous shape transformations as a result of the distribution of local active deformation of its "elements". Currently, the ability to mimic this shaping mode in manmade structures is poor.

I will present some results of our study of actively deforming thin sheets.

Theoretically, we have formulated an elastic theory for such bodies and derived from it an approximate 2D plate theory for plates with intrinsic non-Euclidean metric.

Experimentally, we use environmentally responsive gel sheets that adopt prescribed metrics upon induction by environmental conditions. With this system we study the shaping mechanism in different cases of imposed metrics. This study reviled a connection between helical configurations of seed pod valves and of chiral macromolecules.

Shaping via Active Deformation of Synthetic and Natural Elastic Sheets

Prof. Eran Sharon