Prof. Kon-Well Wang Stephen P. Timoshenko Collegiate Professor of Mechanical Engineering University of Michigan, USA

Biography: Dr. Kon-Well Wang is the Stephen P. Timoshenko Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan (U-M) and the former Department Chair (2008-18) of the Mechanical Engineering Department. He has also served as a Division Director at the U.S. National Science Foundation for two years, 2019-20, via an Executive Intergovernmental Personnel Act appointment. Dr. Wang received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, worked at the General Motors Research Labs as a Sr. Research Engineer, and started his academic career at the Pennsylvania State University in 1988. At Penn State, Dr. Wang has served as the William E. Diefenderfer Chaired Professor, co-founder and Associate Director of the Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence, and a Group Leader for the Center for Acoustics & Vibration. He joined the U-M in 2008. Dr. Wang’s main technical interests are in structural dynamics and controls, especially in the emerging fields of intelligent structural & material systems, with applications in vibration, acoustic & wave controls, energy harvesting, and sensing & monitoring. He has received various recognitions, such as the ASME Rayleigh Lecture Award, the Pi Tau Sigma-ASME Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award, the ASME J.P. Den Hartog Award, the SPIE Smart Structures and Materials Lifetime Achievement Award, the ASME Adaptive Structures and Materials Systems Prize, the ASME N.O. Myklestad Award, the ASME Rudolf Kalman Award, and several other best paper awards. He has been the Editor in Chief for the ASME Journal of Vibration & Acoustics, and an Associate Editor or Editorial Board Member for various journals. Dr. Wang is a Fellow of the ASME, AAAS, and IOP.

 Topic: Intelligent Metastructures – From Adaptive Phononic Crystals to Mechano-Intelligence

Abstract: In recent years, the concept of adaptive metastructures engineered based on nature-inspired modular architectures has been explored to create advanced engineering systems. For example, inspired by the observation that some of skeletal muscle's intriguing macroscale functionalities result from the assembly of nanoscale cross-bridge constituents with metastability, the idea of synthesizing structures from the integration of mechanical metastable modules has been pursued. In another example, inspired by the physics behind the plant nastic movements and the rich designs of origami folding, a class of metastructures is created building on the innovation of fluidic-origami modular elements. Overall, the metastructure modules are designed to be reconfigurable in their shape, mechanical properties, multi-stability features, and dynamic characteristics, so to produce synergistic and intriguing functionalities at the system level, such as adaptive phononic crystals for vibration/noise control and nontraditional wave steering. More recently, with the rapid advances in high-performance intelligent systems, we are witnessing a prominent demand for the next generation of metastructures to have much more built-in intelligence and autonomy. An emerging direction is therefore to pioneer and harness the metastructures’ high dimensionality, multi-stability, and nonlinearity for mechano-intelligence via physical computing. That is, we aim to concurrently embed computing power and functional intelligence, such as observation, learning, memorizing, decision-making and execution, directly in the mechanical domain, advancing from conventional systems that solely rely on add-on electronics and digital computer to achieve intelligence. This presentation will highlight some of these recent advancements in reconfigurable metastructures, from phononic wave control to self-learning-self-tuning structural intelligence.