Natural materials, such as wood and bone, have remarkable properties: they are light, stiff, strong and have a high tolerance to defects, which is often attributed to their irregular microstructure. Yet, this is not exploited in current material development: human-made lightweight materials, such as honeycombs, have a highly regular architecture. Therefore, this project aims to take advantage of natural irregularity to improve the damage-tolerance of lightweight materials. We will use finite element simulations, machine learning techniques, and experiments to quantify how irregularity contributes to toughness, which is the ability of a material to resist crack propagation. The research will be based at Aalto University in collaboration with the University of California Irvine, and the University of Turku. We will show that irregularity can be engineered to develop tougher lightweight materials, which are desperately needed by the transport industry to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

2024

2028