Yuhang Hu
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
Living tissues grow, remodel and adapt to their surroundings, but most engineering materials are mechanically fixed once they are made, because their internal load-bearing networks cannot change. Polymers built with dynamic chemistry, meaning chemical bonds that can break and re-form, are an exception: they can grow and restructure after fabrication.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Chemistry
- Topics
dynamic polymers
chemomechanics
polymer networks
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2029
What they work on
- Formulate thermodynamically consistent constitutive laws from statistical models of evolving polymer networks, so that growth, degrowth, remodeling and stiffness change emerge from coupled reaction, transport and deformation.
- Implement the chemomechanical theory computationally and combine it with mechanics experiments to identify intrinsic material parameters and validate model predictions.
- Develop experimental methods that treat rheological measurements, relaxation indentation and growth kinetics as mechanics boundary value problems for quantifying coupled reaction, transport and deformation.
- Map reaction-controlled, transport-controlled, stress-regulated and intermediate regimes of network evolution using dynamic polymer platforms with systematically varied kinetics, transport and architecture.
More about the research
To design with them, engineers need a theory that predicts how chemical reactions, the movement of molecules through the material, and mechanical deformation together reshape the polymer network. This project aims to extend classical mechanics to such open, evolving materials, which operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium.
Why it matters
Materials whose internal structure can grow and rebuild could be repaired, repurposed and recycled instead of discarded, reducing energy use and material waste. A predictive framework would give engineers a scientific basis for designing such adaptive materials, including soft robots and other systems that must change shape or stiffness over time.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Neda Maghsoodi
University of Southern California, CA·Materials Science
Measure how focused ultrasound produces localized heating, phase transition, deformation, and recovery in programmed liquid crystal elastomers, recording temperature fields, deformation histories, and material properties across ultrasound conditions and material architectures.
Mehrdad Negahban
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NE·Engineering
Extend the Back Stress Expansion model of glassy polymers to include a distribution of relaxation times, the range of timescales over which polymer chains rearrange.
Sachin Goyal
University of California-Merced, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Develop an inverse approach within a rod model framework that estimates constitutive laws, the force-deformation rules, for thin biological filaments from all-atom simulation data and physical experiments.
The school
Georgia Institute of Technology: 50 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 572 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.