Ed Habtour
University of Washington, WA·Engineering·Early-career
Engineers usually copy nature's neat, repeating patterns, like the hexagons of a honeycomb. Living structures are rarely that regular, though.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
structural dynamics
bioinspired design
biomimicry
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2030
What they work on
- Develop dynamics models that predict how irregular segmented structures, modeled on diving seabird necks and stingray wings, guide waves through them by varying local rigidity, interfaces and pattern connectivity.
- Demonstrate that a seabird-neck-like segmented structure can absorb impact energy without damping materials, using engineered irregularities in segment stiffness and connection.
- Demonstrate self-propelled movement without actuators (motors) in a wave-shaped, stingray-like wing structure with tunable irregular patterns.
- Build continuum models, which treat a lattice as a smooth material, to predict how irregular resonator stiffness and spacing in sunflower-inspired Fibonacci lattices affect sound absorption, impedance and bandwidth.
- Design and test indoor and outdoor building panels of Helmholtz resonators, cavities that trap specific sound frequencies, arranged in regular and Fibonacci patterns to reduce 200–2000 Hz noise.
More about the research
A bird's neck or a stingray's wing is made of segments that differ in stiffness, spacing and how they connect. This research asks whether those irregularities do useful work. In particular, can they shape how vibrations, impacts and sound waves move through a structure? Two projects tackle the question: one in structures inspired by animal bodies, and one in sound-absorbing materials inspired by sunflowers.
Why it matters
Noise from highways, airports, trains and construction in the 200–2000 Hz range harms human hearing and health. Panels built from irregular Fibonacci patterns could become an affordable, non-toxic way for affected communities and building designers to reduce that noise. Structures with bird- and stingray-inspired patterns could also lead to lighter shock absorbers, vibration dampers, systems that extract energy from ocean waves, and simpler actuation for robots and vehicles.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
James Gibert
Purdue University, IN·Engineering·Early-career
Establish a mathematical framework, using dynamical systems theory with analytical and numerical modeling, for how topology interacts with nonlinear, time-dependent behavior in heterogeneous mechanical metamaterials.
Xiaojia Zhang
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Engineering·Early-career
Test whether local constitutive behavior, meaning how a small region of material responds to force, links local structural deformation to global fracture, using theory and simulation of homogeneous, defected and heterogeneous metamaterial networks.
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.
The school
University of Washington: 81 labs on PI Pages, $1.7B a year on research, 694 research doctorates a year.
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