Séminaire: Mélina Skouras, chargée de recherche à l'INRIA

Metamaterials, i.e. materials whose macro-scale properties arise from their fine-scale geometric structure, are incredibly diverse in terms of the materials they are made of, the fabrication techniques used, and the behaviors they exhibit. They are also very useful for a wide range of applications and have been actively studied by multiple research communities. In this talk I will present the research I have been conducting in the last ten years on the design and modeling of metamaterials with programmable mechanical and geometrical macro-scale properties, and on their use for the computational fabrication of deformable objects - work that fits the perspective of the computer graphics community (the one I belong to).

Most of the algorithms I have developed with my collaborators rely on two-scale approaches, that first map geometric parameters of our metamaterials to their macro-scale properties, then solve an inverse problem with these properties as degrees of freedom and finally map them back to our initial geometric design parameters. I will start by presenting my work on the exploration of the space of material properties of 3D printed structures corresponding to assemblies of two base materials and their application to topology optimization problems dealing with small deformations. I will then describe my research related to the design of largely deformable objects that can be fabricated flat and be programmed to assume a 3D prescribed shape. I will show how we used our techniques to design and manufacture deployable structures made of textile and plastic strips, cardboard or inflatable membranes, showcasing the diversity of objects that can be designed using our metamaterial-based two-scale strategy.