Skills: Modeling, 3D Design, Mechanical Simulation, and AR Data/Display
In the Spring 2024 semester, I was a teaching assistant for 2.002, Mechanics and Materials II, an undergraduate course at MIT. As part of this course, we taught a nanomaterials/metamaterial lab, where students were challenged to design next generation, lightweight, stiff, and tough architected materials. The teaching assistants then fabricated these samples using two-photon lithography, and we tested them in uniaxial compression with students during their lab sections.
As part of the lab activities, students were asked to predict the performance and failure of their designs. To help with this, I simulated their unit cell with periodic boundary conditions in COMSOL. This revealed stress concentrations, but not in an easily accessible way to the students. Instead, I took the files through a somewhat long process (.STL>.PLY>.GLB), in which the stress information is encoded into the surface of the 3D file as a color/texture on the structure, and then the file is converted to an augmented reality file.
Visit the site on your phone, and you can place your unit cell in the real world, and move around it and even go inside! Students loved this, and I developed a strong understanding of how 3D information can be encoded.
https://portela.mit.edu/2-002-design-challenge-2024/