Exploring the mechanical properties of bending- and stretching-dominated metamaterials

Nature has always had randomness in many ways. Natural cellular structures, specifically, have used randomized microarchitectures to form mechanically efficient materials, such as wood, sponge, and trabecular bone. Mechanical metamaterials are a class of artificial microarchitected materials designed to carry tensions and compressions with...

Analytical description of the forming process of a double curvature shipbuilding plate

The forming of double curvature shipbuilding steel plates is performed by experienced craftsmen at IHC Metalix. Their experience will get lost when they retire; therefore, it can be valuable for future metal workers to capture the forming process of a double curved plate theoretically. An analytical description and understanding of the forming...

Monitoring the impact of droughts on vegetation in Australia using MetOp ASCAT Dynamic Vegetation Parameters

Droughts are considered to be one of the most damaging, yet least understood, natural hazards of all. Despite their prevalence, a thorough understanding of them lacks because they are such complex phenomena, and their manifestation can differ depending on the region they occur in. Monitoring hydrological variables and processes is imperative for...

Design of a reversible growth-from-the-tip device following a complex trajectory: An innovative everting chains principle

Background: Accessing targets through complex trajectories with multiple curves in series, remains challenging today in many application fields, like surgery, the Fukushima disaster, maintenance of complex tube networks, mining and space operations. Current steerable devices require control of an extensive amount of segments, while moving as a...

Curvature recovery using splines

An analysis of curve interpolation with splines as a means to recover the curvature of a ordered set of discrete data points that originate from a closed smooth planar curve, in the context of the levelset method.

Shape-shifting of hyperbolic surfaces: Design and analysis of a shape-shifting method for complex hyperbolic surfaces, based on a passive frame in combination with an active shape-memory polymer

Almost every tissue in the human body is curved in a certain way. Examples are the extracellular matrix of different tissues such as trabecular bone, different acini and blood vessels. As such, the ability to create complex curved structures is crucial in the development of biomimetic biomaterials that could be used, for example, for tissue...

Exploiting active-bending for double curved structures: Research in self-supporting double-curved structures composed of elastically deformed planar elements

This thesis aims to exploit active bending as an approach to create complex curved geometries, which are structurally self-supporting systems. The simplicity of creating complex curved geometries from initially planar elements is the leading motivator for this research. The central research question is: ‘How can double curvature be exploited in...