Architectured soft magnetoactive materials: beyond instabilities
Soft magnetoactive materials can change their properties and undergo extremely large deformations when excited by magnetic stimuli. These reconfigurable soft materials hold great potential for a large variety of applications from sensing devices to energy harvesting, noise and vibration mitigation, and soft robotics. However, these materials operate at high magnetic fields, thus, limiting potential application of the technology. A promising approach to significantly enhance the magnetomechanical performance, and reduce the required magnetic field, is to design soft magnetoactive composites through architectured microstructures. Highly ordered microstructures are an origin for multiscale magnetomechanical instabilities and possible failure of the materials. In this research proposal, we directly address this crucial aspect for MAE-based technology. Moreover, we declare an ambitious goal: Turning failure into functionalities.

Our strategy is to take the risk of operating MAEs in the unstable regime with predesigned instability developments. This novel MAE design concept will capitalize on controllable cascade microstructure transformations while attempting to avoid catastrophic failure. If successful, this concept will open a new avenue in design of morphing magnetoactive materials with new functionalities and superior performance. To achieve this ambitious goal, we will develop multiscale theoretical and computational frameworks to reveal and to predict the behavior of possible advantageous microstructures in the extreme regimes. If successful, we will fill the gap in magnetomechanical multiscale instability phenomena, and will significantly advance the frontier of knowledge about the reconfigurable soft matter. We will probe our ideas experimentally, and will fabricate the revealed advantageous materials with engineered microstructures and properties. We envision revealing the fundamental multiphysics mechanisms of the multiscale magnetomechanical instabilities.