AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

Abstract

Flexible nanostructures are ubiquitous. Biological membranes--- lipid bilayers--- are considered Nature's flexible nanostructures due to their very small thickness, which governs cell's viability and functionality through mechanical deformations. In the realm of man-made flexible nanostructures, molybdenum disulfide, phosphorene, boron nitride, and MXenes---to name a few--- are fascinating for numerous reasons. Both biological and crystalline membranes are modeled as elastic sheets and are extremely flexible. Their bending stiffness is quite small and comparable with the thermal energy, that at room temperature they fluctuate noticeably. These thermal fluctuations appear to impact the overall mechanics and physics of crystalline and biological membranes. The study of statistical mechanics of thermal fluctuations of flexible nanostructures is rendered rather complicated due to the necessity of accounting for constitutive and geometric nonlinearities and various boundary conditions.

Existing treatments draw heavily on analogies in the high-energy physics literature and are hard to extend or modify in the typical contexts that permeate mechanics, materials, and cell mechanics literature. In this talk, I will review some of our recent efforts in developing mechanics-based methodologies to implement concepts of advanced statistical mechanics in continuum mechanics modeling of flexible nanostructures. Our framework provides a novel and unique route to extract mechanical properties of materials from thermal fluctuations spectra, addresses the unexpected stiffening of fluctuating surfaces with size, and provides insights into the fundamental mechanisms of interactions of nanostructures with biological systems.

Speaker

Dr. Fatemeh Ahmadpoor

Professor Fatemeh Ahmadpoor earned her Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2016. She was a postdoc associate at Brown University, before joining the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2019. Professor Ahmadpoor is the recipient of several awards including the NSF CAREER Award, Newark College of Engineering Rising Star Research Award, the 2023 PNAS Cozzarelli Award, and the Cullen College of Engineering Best Dissertation Award. Her research interests include electromechanical coupling in biological systems, entropy-driven mechanics of flexible nanostructures, and interaction of nanostructures with biological systems.