Melih Eriten
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Engineering
Soft materials behave differently from metals and plastics: they stretch, flow and respond differently depending on how quickly they are loaded. Two projects build on this mechanics of soft materials.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
contact mechanics
soft materials
hydrogels
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Prototype a low-cost optical sensor that infers a material's mechanical behavior from surface waves emitted during cutting, and validate it against multipoint laser vibrometry.
- Test the sensor on gelatin with deformable fillers as a controllable cheese substitute, then on cheddar, Gouda and mozzarella, to relate surface-wave signals to cheese properties and reduce trim losses.
- Test whether the solid network of liquid-swollen soft materials controls both adhesion and friction strength, using bulk, peeling and sliding experiments with laser and particle image velocimetry near the interface.
- Build and validate a unified contact model for soft swollen materials with the Variational Multiscale Discontinuous Galerkin method, testing whether material relaxation times govern suction–friction coupling, and implement it in an open-source finite element code.
More about the research
One applies it to a practical food-industry problem, cutting cheese with less waste. The other builds basic physical models of how wet, soft materials stick and slide against surfaces.
Why it matters
A real-time cutting sensor could help cheesemakers cut the waste that costs up to 30% of revenue, improve pack-to-pack consistency, and give the industry data on how cheese texture varies. The sensor could later extend to other portioned foods such as fruits, vegetables, meat and cereal bars. Separately, a validated model of how soft wet materials stick and slide could support the design of soft robots, wearable electronics on skin, and simulations of joints, surgical cutting and soft-tissue injuries.
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.
Ranajay Ghosh
University of Central Florida, FL·Engineering·Early-career
Test whether concentrated salt solutions give green strength to oxide and nitride ceramic powder beds through ion transport and particle bridging during wetting and drying, using mechanical testing, microscopy and x-ray imaging.
Daniele Panozzo
New York University, NY·Computer Science
Develop dPolyFEM, an open-source modular framework for differentiable simulation, which computes how simulation results change with inputs, for elastic objects with large deformations, contact and friction.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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