Stay updated with our latest research developments, publications, awards, and team achievements.
My new paper "Elastic instabilities in soft layered composites with alternating interlayer spacing" has been published in Thin-Walled Structures. The main message: you can tune the onset of buckling without adding any stiff material, simply by rearranging the layers. And a word of caution – perfectly periodic composites are the most stable, so one should not blindly trust periodic predictions if periodicity cannot be guaranteed during manufacturing.
Our collaborative paper with the group of Prof. Thomas Pfohl has been published in ACS Applied Polymer Materials. In "Buckling as a Tool for Spatiotemporal Sensing in Micromechanical Fluidic Systems", thin PDMS membranes inside a microfluidic channel buckle in response to the solvent composition, and a propagating solvent front even produces traveling buckling waves. A neat way to turn an elastic instability into a label-free chemical sensor! Great collaboration!
Dr. David Schwarz successfully defended his PhD thesis "Mechanical Metamaterials with Engineered Responses" and graduated magna cum laude, with the presentation itself rated summa cum laude! David joined the group back in 2022, and over three years he explored how to teach metamaterials to do crazy things! It was a great pleasure to supervise David, and I am very proud of everything he has achieved. Congratulations, David, and all the best for what comes next! PS. Get used to be called Dr. Schwarz :)
Our collaborative work "Light-Induced Training of 3D-Printed Mechanical Metamaterials" has been published in Advanced Materials Technologies and is featured on its front cover. If you are interested in how we can train metamaterials to do some tricks, definitely give it a read. I thank all our co-authors and chemistry wizards, who managed to create a 3D-printable filament that responds to UV light.
The first Japan–Germany Frontiers of Engineering Symposium just wrapped up in Tokyo. It was an incredibly intensive three days full of constant scientific interaction between participants. I really enjoyed the format that we (Sarah, Aki, Seki, and I) designed, and I believe that everyone learned a lot of new things. Thanks to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the other funding partners, I hope that these new connections will grow into long-term collaborations! BTW, Japan is amazing! And the trains are always on time (looking at you, DB).
Mr. (soon to be officially Dr.) Gerrit Felsch successfully defended his PhD thesis "Machine Learning for the Generative Design of Mechanical Metamaterials". I enjoyed every (well, almost every :)) day we worked together, and I am very happy that I hired Gerrit back in 2021! He not only developed some very cool generative approaches, but also taught me a lot of neat ML tricks. We all wish The Gerrit the best in his new role at DLR!
Ms. Dan Wang received the highest grade (1.0) for her thesis "Mechanical Metamaterials with Explicitly and Implicitly Defined Geometry". It was a rewarding year-long journey exploring nonconventional ways to define unit-cell geometry and link it to mechanical properties. Dan did a superb job employing the level-set method, FEniCS for homogenization, and generative machine learning to design metamaterials with desired properties. We wish her great success in her future career!
After two productive years here in Freiburg, Michael is returning to CTU Prague to continue his journey as a Dozent. Michael brought many new ideas to our group, and we’re sad to see him go. But we’ll definitely continue to collaborate — and hopefully have a chance to play some disc golf together in the future :) All the best!
The third collaborative paper in the series devoted to the unusual behavior of hydrogel-based metamaterials has been published in Advanced Materials. In "Soft Robotic Engines with Non-Reciprocal Motion by Physical Intelligence", my contribution was relatively small, but the paper itself is absolutely fascinating. It demonstrates how non-reciprocal motion can be achieved through the smart design of hydrogels. The research group of Prof. Andreas Walther are absolute magicians when it comes to chemistry!
I was invited to give a talk at the 2025 International Conference on High-end Equipment and Intelligent Manufacturing in Shaoxing, China. It was an absolutely wonderful experience, and I learned a lot, even though most of the talks were in Chinese. I would especially like to thank Prof. Jing Ni for the invitation, and I’m already looking forward to attending next year!
The Cluster of Excellence started a new iteration of the MasterLab program for talented Master’s Students. We are lucky to have Ms. Priyanshi Malvinya and Mr. Pawel Ostrowski on our team! Priyanshi will work on web-based visualization of mechanical materials. Pawel has already started to work with Michael on the self-organization and self-assembly using bristle-bots moving on a vibrating table
We are seeing an enormous progress in generative models. Take a look at Midjourney, Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and very recently Sora from OpenAI. It is not surprising that similar approaches become popular for designing structures metamaterials. But why don't we see models capable of creating kirigami metamaterials?
Okay, the semester is over, and it marks another teaching success. For two consecutive semesters, my classes have been rated the best in Microsystems Engineering and Embedded Systems Engineering programs!
I am happy to share with you David's first paper devoted metamaterials switchable auxeticity. The trick is simple—just exploit self-contact between elements trigger topological changes! What can we do this effect? Check out the video!
I'm excited to share that my paper titled "Bandgap Structure in Elastic Metamaterials with Curvy Bezier Beams" has been successfully published in the special issue "Fundamentals and Applications of Metamaterials: Breaking the Limits" of Applied Physics Letters. Here, I examined how altering the geometry of beams in lattice-based metamaterials can affect the tunability of bandgaps.
Our short and quite neat paper has been published in Acta Mechanica. Led by Indre Jödicke, this research project takes a somewhat different perspective on truss-based metamaterials. With advancements in additive manufacturing, the components of these metamaterials are becoming increasingly smaller, occasionally too small for reliable fabrication. Our study explores whether slight alterations in lattice geometry can circumvent these fabrication challenges. Using a minimal viable case, we demonstrate that sometimes being anisotropic is actually good.
Our work with Gerrit has been presented in two conferences. First, I visited the beautiful city of Alghero, and then together, we attended first AI MSE conference Saarbrücken. You can see my talk below (although not best quality). ---
Please check a very interesting recent paper from Bastian Rapp's group devoted to the development of shape memory polymers for morphing structures and soft robotics. I contributed bit with simulations, but main credits go amazing Qingchuan Song, who is a real magician.
This semester, Mr. Gerrit Felsch and I collaborated to develop an entirely new course centered around the application of Machine Learning in Structural Mechanics. The comprises 13 lectures 12 practical sessions, all aimed at providing students with a comprehensive understanding modern ML methods enabling them implement these techniques for various challenges within materials science and mechanical engineering.
It’s very nice to start the New Year with a paper in Science! Check out our perspective paper by Lars Pastewka and me, in which we comment on the amazing manuscript by Antoine Aymard, Emilie Delplanque, Davy Dalmas, and Julien Scheibert. They’ve developed a very inspiring and robust way of designing friction metainterfaces using asperities with different heights. We hint at the future of frictional metainterfaces, drawing insights from the evolution of mechanical metamaterials.
I had the immense pleasure of delivering a talk at seminar hosted by Prof. Jan Zeman in Prague! The Open Mechanics Group CTU Prague is forefront tackling highly advanced challenges mechanics, making it well worth exploring their remarkable array publications!
Two amazing students from Penn State have been working in our group for two months on very exciting topics of structural health monitoring metamaterials and enigmatic unrolling scotch tape! We are looking forward to continuing collaboration publishing new manuscripts!
Dr. Michael Somr from Czech Technical University in Prague joined our team for six months to collaborate on very thrilling topic of bristle bots. If you don't know what is bristlebot, stay tuned for our oncoming publications! 🙂
Gerrit and David just returned back from a very productive two-week research visit to our colleagues at Czech Technical University in Prague. We are looking forward their exciting stories!
Wow! Our teammate Dr. Edoardo Milana just got promoted to W1 Junior Professor position at IMTEK, University of Freiburg! sincere congratulations!
Mr. Lukas Kürner joined our team to work on very interesting (and still secret :)) project together with Kayiang and Qingchuan!
Our paper "Controlling auxeticity in curved-beam metamaterials via a deep generative model" has been published in esteem journal of "Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering". Here we propose a deep generative model enabling us to efficiently design various metamaterials. Congratulations to Gerrit with his first first-author publication!
Our brief perspective paper, in collaboration with Dr. Falk Tauber, has been published \\\\\\"Frontiers in Robotics and AI\\". Here we discuss the challenges of soft robotics from the perspective of researchers who are relatively new in this field, presenting both positive and negative aspects of current trends in soft robots.\\"
We published preprint titled "Controlling auxeticity in curved-beam metamaterials via a deep generative model" here. Thanks Gerrit, Naeim and David for great work!
Dr. Edoardo Milana joined our group! He won prestigious Walther Benjamin DFG fellowship and will work with us on soft robotics. Check out his amazing research.
Mr. Adam Racz joined our team to work on collaborative project with colleagues from Penn State.
We are happy to welcome Dr. Michael Somr from Czech Technical University in Prague.
Mr. David Schwarz joined our group as PhD student. He will work on the mechanical metamaterials with advanced functionalities demand.
Mr. Sabbathi Joshua Nikhil successfully defended his Master's thesis titled "Harnessing plasticity in energy-harvesting mechanical metamaterials". Congratulations, Joshua!
Great news on the first day of summer! Our work with Prof. Dr. Andreas Walter and Mr. Oliver Skarsetz from University Mainz has been published!
Our collaborative project with Prof. Mariantonieta Gutierrez Soto from Penn State "Hiding form Earthquakes with an Adaptive Metabarrier" has been selected for participation in Adaptive Architecture Idea Incubator. I am looking forward to exploring this new exciting topic!
A new manuscript titled "Emergence of instability-driven domains in soft stratified materials" has been published in prestigious journal npj Computational Materials. Together with my colleagues, we studied formation of involved patterns in composite deformable composite materials.
I am very happy to participate as host in DFG and BMBF program "Freiburg Rising Stars". Together with Dr. Edoardo Milana, we are going to work on soft robots, driven by metamaterials.
Together with Mr. Aryan Rana, we 3D-printed this interesting robot. Can you guess what drives its motion?
Ms. Kajal Jain and Mr. Baris Erol for last six months have been working on small but very exiting projects in our lab. Baris studied propagation of the elastic waves in tillable metamaterials. Kajal developed an automated setup enabling us to study interaction between multiple permanent magnets and self-assembly on mesoscale level. Thanks both of you for your dedication and awesome results!
The abstract "Generative design of perforated mechanical metamaterials" was accepted for oral talk on prestigious 11th European Solid Mechanics Conference in Galway, Ireland. Good job, Gerrit!
Mr. Sabbathi Joshua Nikhil joined our team as Master's student to work on his thesis devoted plasticity and failure in mechanical metamaterials. Stay tuned for new results!
Our research and recently initiated Spaghetti Project were highlighted on the news! Check out this episode
As the part of Freiburger Wissenschaftsmarkt we presented a public science "Spaghetti-Project"! Everyone can contribute to this project by performing simple experiment at home and submitting the results. If we gather enough data, you will be a co-author of the scientific manuscript!
Mr. Gerrit Felsch joined our group as PhD student. He will work on the adaptive mechanical metamaterials that can be reprogrammed after manufacturing.
Ms. Indre Jödicke joined our team to work on booster project "Heterogeneity as an ally against defects". She will study the lattice materials that are tolerant to the manufacturing defects.
We received new equipment, including 3D printers, CCD camera, modal shaker, ICP accelerometers, and many other smaller things.