SimTech Colloquium: AI-assisted inverse design of architected materials (Dennis M. Kochmann)

January 15, 2025, 4:00 p.m. (CET)

Time: January 15, 2025, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Venue: Hörsaal V7.01
Pfaffenwaldring 7
70569  Stuttgart
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Multiscale material modeling has two primary goals: the forward problem (i) aims at understanding and predicting a material’s properties based on its small-scale architecture, while the inverse problem (ii) seeks to identify those small-scale structural features that enable us to control and optimize a material’s properties and performance. Owing to the rise of additive manufacturing, architected materials (or metamaterials) have emerged as a special class of man-made materials with exciting, peculiar, or tunable properties, and as a new playground for computational modeling. While the forward problem (i) has been tackled by many successful modeling techniques across scales, the inverse problem (ii) has remained a challenge: how do we design (meta-)materials with target properties? At the core of this challenge are the abundant design and property spaces, as well as the fact that the map from structure to properties is not invertible. In this seminar, we will discuss how machine learning has recently offered new opportunities for the inverse design of architected materials through generative models that predict metamaterial building blocks with extreme, peculiar, or general target mechanical properties. 

Dennis M. Kochmann received his education at Ruhr-University Bochum and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After postdoc positions at Wisconsin and Caltech, he became Assistant Professor of Aerospace at the California Institute of Technology in 2011, and Professor of Aerospace in 2016, a position he held through 2019. Since April 2017 he has been Professor of Mechanics and Materials at ETH Zürich, where he served as Head of the Institute of Mechanical Systems and as Deputy Head of Department. His research focuses on the link between microstructure and properties of natural and architected materials, which includes the development of theoretical, computational, and experimental methods to bridge across scales from nano to macro. His research has been recognized by, among others, IUTAM’s Bureau Prize in Solid Mechanics, GAMM’s Richard von Mises Prize, an NSF CAREER Award, ASME’s T.J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award, an ERC Consolidator Grant, and IACM’s John Argyris Award. He serves as Associate Editor for ASME’s Applied Mechanics Reviews and Archive of Applied Mechanics, as Vice-Chair of the Swiss Community for Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (SWICCOMAS) and on the Board of Directors of the Society of Engineering Science (SES).

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