Katia Bertoldi
Harvard University, MA·Engineering
Many materials get their strength from tangled fibers. Examples include polymer networks, textiles and steel-cable structures.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
entangled materials
network science
textiles
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2030
What they work on
- Develop quantitative measures of entanglement by testing 3D-printed textile architectures and woven metamaterials, which are structures whose properties come from their designed geometry, in both mechanical experiments and simulations.
- Convert filament structures into simplified skeleton and contact networks with geometric and topological attributes, and use them to link entanglement features to mechanical performance.
- Optimize entanglement geometries for user-defined mechanical properties using graph neural networks, which are machine-learning models that work on networks, combined with gradient-based refinement.
- Produce prototype materials with engineered entanglements, and release open-source tools and data for designing fabrics, textiles and knits at industrial scale.
More about the research
Their mechanical behavior depends on two things: the fibers themselves, and the complicated ways the fibers wrap around and touch one another. Because there are no simple models of these tangled geometries, engineers struggle to predict how such materials will behave or to design new ones on purpose.
Why it matters
Better ways to predict and design tangled-fiber materials could help textile and fabric makers create knits and woven products with properties chosen in advance, such as particular stiffness or stretch. This could reduce trial-and-error in manufacturing. Open-source design tools and data aimed at industrial-scale fabrics could make this kind of design available to engineers and companies beyond the research team.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jun Wang
Santa Clara University, CA·Engineering
Extend the known theoretical limits of the mechanical property space reachable by aperiodic architected cellular material (AACM) units using a computational discovery framework.
Hang Liu
Washington State University, WA·Materials Science·Early-career
Determine how spinneret geometry shapes side-by-side fiber formation when an intrinsically conductive polymer is co-spun with a conventional spinnable polymer in a wet-spinning process.
Jun Li
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach, FL·Engineering
Develop direct mesoscale simulations of 3D printing that couple heat, mechanical forces, chemistry and fluid-structure interactions, to show how temperature gradients and melting between filaments and reinforcing fibers lead to micro-cracks.
The school
Harvard University: 42 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 712 research doctorates a year.
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