Department Seminar of Benny Bar On - How to build a "bridge"? Nature's strategy for connecting hard and soft materials
Monday 18.03.2024 at 14:00
Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering, Room 206
How to build a "bridge"?
Nature's strategy for connecting hard and soft materials
Benny Bar-On
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Load-bearing biological materials employ specialized bridging regions to connect material parts with substantially different mechanical properties (hard vs. soft). While such bridging regions have been extensively observed in diverse biomaterial systems that evolved through distinctive evolutionary paths—including arthropod parts, dental tissues, and marine threads—their mechanical origins and functional roles remain vague.
In my talk, I introduce a hypothesis that these bridging regions have primarily formed to minimize the near-interface stress effects between the connected material parts, preventing their splitting failure, and obtain a simple theoretical law for the optimal mechanical properties of such bridging regions. I demonstrate this principle through Finite Element simulations and physical experiments on a model synthetic-material system and verify its predictability for different biomaterial systems. The bridging principles of biological materials can be implemented into advanced material designs—paving the way to new forms of architected materials and composite structures with extreme load-bearing capabilities.
Biography: Benny Bar-on is a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Technion and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces. Prof. Bar-On's research aims to identify structural–mechanical relationships in load-bearing biological materials, including plant organs, mineralized tissues, and arthropod cuticles.
