Dr. Xin Liu is collaborating with Dr. Yiran Yang at Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering (IMSE) department in design, prototyping, and computational modeling of a new type of beam lattice metamaterials. Beam lattices are emerging material systems whose mechanical performance can be tailored from structural design instead of material compositions.
Dr. Liu has proposed a new design paradigm for general beam lattices using I-shape beams instead of circular shape beams. With the new design, the team has numerically and experimentally demonstrated significant improvement in the stiffness and strength of the conventional body-centered cubic (BCC) lattices. This work “Liu, X., Kobir, M.H., Yang, Y., Jiang, F. and Kothari, T., 2023. Improving stiffness and strength of body-centered cubic lattices with an I-shape beam cross-section. Mechanics of Materials, 182, p.104665.” has been published in Mechanics of Materials. The image of the new lattices printed by selective laser sintering (SLS) has been selected as the cover page of the journal.