Composite and Smart Materials and Structures (KNTU & ITTD Newsletter N. 3)
Smart/multifunctional materials and structures are widely used in medical, automotive, energy and aerospace technologies for applications such as force sensing, actuation, energy harvesting and structural health monitoring. While a large number of smart materials exhibiting interesting multiphysics phenomena have emerged in the past few decades, only a minuscule fraction of these have been successfully translated to engineering applications. Most engineering applications, for instance, utilize piezoelectric materials and shape memory alloys (SMAs) due to their robust response, repeatability and wide availability. Thus, there is a need to enhance the response of existing smart materials to meet the technological demands. Furthermore, with recent scientific advancements in fields such as artificial intelligence, biomimetics, nanotechnology, there is a growing need for smart/responsive materials that can enable miniaturization, improve data storage and energy efficiency. To address these larger problems and to better utilize the existing smart materials, it is important that research advancements across various scientific and engineering communities come together.
