Note: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Penn State College of Engineering. This one-year project will conclude in January 2018. “We want to know exactly how these resonators stop these waves, so that we can design them effectively.”Įstablished in 2014, the Multidisciplinary Research Seed Grant program aims to help faculty attract high-impact multidisciplinary and center-level research funding from the state and federal government, industry or foundations.

“I think there is a lot of potential, but we are trying to investigate the phenomenon from the bottom up to really understand what’s going on,” said Shokouhi. If the results are favorable, this research could lead to a fundamental change in the way engineers design structures to combat the damaging effects of earthquakes and explosions. This will allow the team to study the effects of soil heterogeneity, non-elastic and nonlinear behavior, and water saturation on the performance of the metamaterial. The holes will be drilled in the compacted soil and the steel or wooden rods will be inserted. Then, the team will replicate a scaled-down version of a life-size scenario using a soil-filled box on a shake table. The wave field across the plate will then be recorded.

Considering the widely studied phase-transition dynamics in VO2, the proposed hybrid metamaterials are capable of offering ultrafast modulation of THz radiation. A shaker or stack of piezo elements mounted on the plate will serve as the stimulus. Here, we show that an integration of VO2 structures and conventional metallic resonating components can enable a class of highly tunable THz metamaterials. They will test a small aluminum plate with punched holes and steel rods to simulate the resonating units. Based on the outcome of the numerical study, the researchers will then build and test a small-scale simplified model using the recommended formation.

Penn state meta materials