Conferences
1–5 July 2024, Como, Italy
Mechanics of Active Soft Materials: Experiments, Theory, Numerics, and Applications
Active soft materials are a class of smart materials whose physical properties can be controlled by external stimuli such as temperature, pH, light, electric, or magnetic fields. Several active soft materials and their respective stimuli are at the forefront of materials science research today.
Thanks to their unique properties, active soft materials can be applied in numerous fields, from soft robotics to medicine and pharmacology. Their potential in these fields is further promoted by the continuous advancements in additive manufacturing technologies, which ensure freeform production of customized parts using active materials, improving the so-called 4D printing.
To further accelerate these materials and related technologies towards widespread adoption, a thorough understanding and prediction of their complex behavior is of utmost importance. This will allow us not only to accelerate the design of new types of materials, but also to optimize their behavior depending on application needs. In this framework, cross-disciplinary expertise should be tackled, hence the emerging need for a new generation of scientists capable of combining fundamental concepts from different disciplines.
The proposed school aims at creating a bridge between mechanics, chemistry, and physics to educate future scientists in the novel and fast-growing scientific framework of active soft matter. Particularly, lectures will introduce the participants to fundamental notions of solid, computational, and experimental mechanics for these materials, also tackling recent and underdeveloped aspects related to the use of artificial intelligence and to fracture issues. The participants will then be introduced to the most used representative classes of materials and to numerous innovative application fields.
