Penn Engineering Events

MEAM

  1. Events
  2. MEAM

Events Search and Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

MEAM Seminar: “Can Materials From the 1930’s Really Revolutionize Battery Manufacturing?”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Fluorinated polymers offer a plethora of unique and sometimes perplexing properties. One of the most interesting is the ability for specific types of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) to undergo room-temperature, sheer-induced, structural transformations leading “unwinding” of crystallites and the formation of nano-scale fibers. This process is commonly referred to as “fibrillation”. The material properties required for this […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Tribosintering of Metal Oxide Nanocrystals”

Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology 3205 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Machinery relies on lubrication to regulate friction and wear at contacting interfaces. As lubricants become less viscous to save energy and cost, and as new technologies like electric vehicles operate in harsher conditions, the risk of surface-initiated failure grows. We show that metal oxide nanocrystals (NCs) dispersed in lubricants form protective coatings, or tribofilms, in […]

MEAM Seminar: “Differentiable Algorithms for Non-differentiable Robotics: Dexterous Manipulation via Implicit Learning and Control”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

As we ask our robotic systems to become more capable, with the ultimate aim of deploying robots into complex and ever-changing scenarios, the vast space of potential tasks drives the need for flexibility and generalization. For all the promise of big-data machine learning, what will happen when robots deploy to our homes and workplaces and […]

MEAM Seminar: “Leveraging Impedance Properties for Free Self-Sensing in Actuators for Compact Robots”

Towne 319 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, United States

Self-sensing actuators provide a compelling approach to designing compact robotic systems by integrating sensing capabilities directly into the actuator, eliminating the need for external sensors. This presentation, titled "Leveraging Impedance Properties for Free Self-Sensing in Actuators for Compact Robots," highlights how the intrinsic impedance properties of actuators—resistance, inductance, and induced EMF—can be harnessed to achieve […]

MEAM Seminar: “Modeling the Unique Behaviors of Liquid Crystal Elastomers”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) exhibit complex thermomechanical behaviors that can be harnessed for a wide variety of applications in soft robotics, biomedical devices, and impact protection. The material comprises stiff mesogens bound in an elastomeric network of flexible polymer chains. The mesogens can order and disorder in response to temperature and mechanical deformation. This allows […]

MEAM Seminar: “Robots that Evolve on Demand”

Wu & Chen Auditorium

Soft robots have the potential to adapt their morphologies and behavioral control policies to changing tasks and environments. Inspired by the dynamic plasticity of living organisms and the general adaptability of animals, this talk will discuss several shape-shifting soft robot platforms for multi-task performance and multi-environment locomotion—for example, robotic skins, robotic fabrics, and robots with […]

MEAM Seminar: “Digital Twins for the Earth System”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Reliable forecasts of the Earth system are crucial for human progress and safety from natural disasters. Artificial intelligence offers substantial potential to improve prediction accuracy and computational efficiency in this field, however this remains underexplored in many domains. Here we introduce Aurora, a large-scale foundation model for the Earth system trained on over a million […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Bio-inspired Architected Materials/structures with Enhanced Failure Characteristics”

Towne 319 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, United States

Structural failure is a critically important design consideration in many engineering applications. Nature provides a number of interesting examples of lightweight structural features that exhibit outstanding failure characteristics. Recent progress in additive manufacturing has facilitated precise control over geometric features, allowing for the implementation of bio-inspired structural designs on a layer-by-layer basis. In this thesis, […]

MEAM Seminar: “Flow Architectures, From Capillary Networks to Blood Transport through Organs”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Flow systems in nature, whether animate or inanimate, have evolved in time toward greater efficiency by adapting, or ‘morphing’, their configuration to decrease resistance to the currents flowing through them. Observations at various scales indicate that the distribution of flow, i.e. the connection of a point (source/sink) to a volume (sink/source) or vice-versa, is the […]

MEAM Seminar: “Miniaturized Robots and Probes for Precision Health”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Designing miniaturized robots and bioelectronic devices will enable access throughout the entire human body, leading to novel procedures at the cellular level and offering localized diagnosis and treatment with unprecedented precision and efficiency. However, the soft, complex, and multi-dimensional nature of biological systems poses significant challenges for mechanical design, manufacturing, materials engineering, and functional integration […]