About the project
Imagine a programmable material that can behave like a soft polymer one moment and a stiff metal the next. This project explores adaptive and active metamaterials for defence, combining smart actuation, lightweight architectures, AI-guided design, manufacturing, and testing to create structures that sense, respond, and protect in real time.
The research addresses a fundamental challenge in defence engineering: conventional lightweight materials are usually designed with fixed properties, yet future platforms must operate under highly variable and mission-critical conditions. The project will investigate how architected lattices and other metamaterial topologies can be combined with active material systems to create structures with tunable mechanical response. The work will combine mechanics-based modelling, finite element simulations, AI-assisted design optimisation, additive manufacturing, and experimental testing under static and dynamic loading.
Expected outcomes include:
- new design principles for active metamaterials
- prototype lightweight structures with programmable behaviour
- validated computational tools for adaptive structural design
The project is highly interdisciplinary, sitting at the interface of mechanics, smart materials, defence technology, manufacturing, and artificial intelligence.
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