Publications related to Re-entry analysis of critical components and materials for design-for-demise techniques

Design for demise applied to spacecraft structural panels and experiments for ClearSpace One platform

With growing awareness of the vulnerability of the near-Earth space region and the anticipated surge in satellite objects, efforts are underway to assess and implement various mitigation strategies. These aim to minimize the impact of space activities and ...

EPFL2024

Customized modular multi-material mouthguard and method of making the same

Dominique Pioletti, Martin Broome, Naser Nasrollahzadeh Mamaghani

There is described a mouthguard comprising an externally exposed impact protective region defined by a first material property and configured to cover a front tooth, an internally exposed occlusional cushioning region defined by a second material property ...

2024

Computational Homogenization for Inverse Design of Surface-based Inflatables

Mark Pauly, Francis Julian Panetta, Uday Kusupati, Yingying Ren, Florin Isvoranu, Seiichi Eduardo Suzuki Erazo

Surface-based inflatables are composed of two thin layers of nearly inextensible sheet material joined together along carefully selected fusing curves. During inflation, pressure forces separate the two sheets to maximize the enclosed volume. The fusing c ...

2024

Insights from an extensive triaxial testing campaign on a shale for comparative site characterization of a deep geological repository

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Eleonora Crisci

Several boreholes were drilled for site comparison of a deep geological repository (DGR) in Northern Switzerland. The main target of the exploration program was the >100m thick Opalinus Clay, the designated host rock encountered at approximately 450 to 100 ...

Elsevier2024

Modeling friction and wear using an adaptive discrete-continuum coupling

Manon Eugénie Voisin--Leprince

When two objects slide against each other, wear and friction occur at their interface. The accumulation of wear forms what is commonly referred to as a ``third-body''. Understanding third-body evolution has significant applications in industry, where contr ...

EPFL2024

Morphological and Material Programability of a Hall-Effect Based Soft Tactile Sensors

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Sudong Lee

The different receptors in human skin show not only diversity in the stimuli to which they respond, but also variable sensitivity and directionality. This is often determined by their location or morphology, and can play an important role in filtering or a ...

IEEE2024

Influence of model uncertainty and long term deformations in action effects calculation in reinforced concrete structures

Xhemsi Malja

Most codes of practice adopt a semi probabilistic design approach for the dimensioning and assessment of structures. Accordingly, structural safety is ensured by performing limit state verifications using design values determined with adequately calibrated ...

EPFL2024

Atomic-scale Characterization of Strain and Gate effects on Two-dimensional Materials by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

Jz -Yuan Juo

Strain is an inevitable phenomenon in two-dimensional (2D) material, regardless of whether the film is suspended or supported. Moreover, strain is known to alter the physical and chemical properties, such as the band gap, charge carrier effective masses, d ...

EPFL2023

Experimental testing and structural analysis of composite tile – reinforced concrete domes

Savvas Saloustros

Conventional formworks for concrete curved shells either are expensive, complex and wasteful or have formal restrictions. Using tile vaults (also known as timbrel, Guastavino, thin-tile or Catalan vaults) as stay-in-place formwork for concrete shells could ...

2023

Experiments and proposed model for residual stresses in hot-rolled wide flange shapes

Albano António De Abreu E Presa De Castro E Sousa, Dimitrios Lignos, Andronikos Skiadopoulos

This paper proposes a new residual stress model for hot-rolled wide flange steel cross sections. For this purpose, a dataset of 85 residual stress measurements is first assembled. The dataset is comprised of prior measurements available in the literature t ...

2023

Tailoring Organic/Inorganic Interface Trap States of Metal Oxide/Polyimide toward Improved Vacuum Surface Insulation

Chao Wang, Guang-Yu Sun, Haoxiang Zhao

High-voltage and high-power devices are indispensablein spacecraftfor outer space explorations, whose operations require aerospace materialswith adequate vacuum surface insulation performance. Despite persistentattempts to fabricate such materials, current ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Advancing spacecraft demisability through a novel composite bolt joint system: a step toward sustainable and safe space environments

Véronique Michaud, Muriel Richard, Alexandre Achille Looten, Antonio Caiazzo

From the recent awareness of the booming number of space debris and their derived worldwide re-entry event threat originating from the use of high survivability components, complementary mitigation measures must be taken for future orbital elements. In thi ...

2023

Design of an intake and a thruster for an atmosphere-breathing electric propulsion system

Thomas Binderup Jensen, Francesco Romano

Challenging space missions include those at very low altitudes, where the atmosphere is the source of aerodynamic drag on the spacecraft, that finally defines the mission's lifetime, unless a way to compensate for it is provided. This environment is named ...

2022

Understanding the mechanisms of adhesive wear for heterogeneous materials through atomistic simulations

Jean-François Molinari, Sacha Zenon Wattel, Antonio Joaquin Garcia Suarez

When two rough surfaces slide against each other, two main behaviors can be observed at the asperity level: A ductile behavior where the asperities tend to smooth out or a brittle behavior where the asperities detach and form debris. Recently, a critical l ...

2022

Thermodynamics of organic electrochemical transistors

Hsin Tseng, Matteo Cucchi

Though models describing the operating mechanism of organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) have been developed, these models are unable to accurately reproduce OECT electrical characteristics. Here, the authors report a thermodynamic-based framework t ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Manufacturing and toughening effects on the material properties of wind turbine blade adhesives

Anastasios Vassilopoulos, Dharun Vadugappatty Srinivasan

Hybrid adhesives can be developed using commercially available adhesive materials and customized to the required loading conditions. In this paper, SPABONDTM 820HTA (non-toughened) and SPABONDTM 840HTA (toughened) adhesives are hybridized by two strategies ...

2022

Strengthening mechanisms in dilute and random solid solution high-entropy BCC alloys

Alireza Ghafarollahi

Tuning the mechanical properties of metals, including strength, through adjusting the type and/or concentration of added solute elements, has been recognized as an effective way to design and produce materials with desired or optimized mechanical propertie ...

EPFL2022

Influence of sustained loading on resistance and deformation capacity of reinforced concrete members in compression

Aurelio Muttoni, Miguel Fernández Ruiz, Xhemsi Malja

As acknowledged explicitly or implicitly in most of current design codes, a high level of sustained loading has a detrimental effect on the concrete compressive strength. However, its beneficial effect in terms of deformation capacity is neglected in most ...

ERNST & SOHN2022

Electronic-structure methods for materials design

Nicola Marzari, Andrea Ferretti

Simulations can be used to accelerate the characterization and discovery of materials. Here we Review how electronic-structure methods such as density functional theory work, what properties they can be used to predict and how they can be used to design ma ...

NATURE RESEARCH2021

Common workflows for computing material properties using different quantum engines

Sebastiaan Philippe Huber, Nicola Marzari, Gian-Marco Rignanese, Giovanni Pizzi, Aliaksandr Yakutovich, Berend Smit, Martin Uhrin, Conrad Johnston, Austin Jacob Zadoks, Samuel Poncé, Kristjan Eimre, Marnik Bercx, Christopher John Sewell

The prediction of material properties based on density-functional theory has become routinely common, thanks, in part, to the steady increase in the number and robustness of available simulation packages. This plurality of codes and methods is both a boon ...

2021