Stephan Rudykh, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

Oscar Lopez-Pamies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Soft materials is an increasingly active field of research driving science and technology into new exciting directions. Large deformations coupled with various multiphysics phenomena and instabilities at different length scales open an immensely rich research area. This combination offers unique opportunities to develop multifunctional materials and devices with novel properties, through the targeted design of material composition and microstructural geometry. Moreover, soft materials represent an essential component in biological tissues, a topic of extreme interest for bio-medical applications. This mini-symposium will address recent experimental, computational, theoretical and manufacturing advances in this direction. Topics of particular interest include:

• Soft Active Materials such as Electroactive and Magnetoactive elastomers, Ionic Polymer-Metal Composites (IPMC), Shape-memory and light-sensitive polymers, Liquid crystal elastomers

• Hydrogels and soft wet materials

• Instabilities, fracture, and adhesion in soft materials

• Soft biological and bio-inspired materials

• Wave propagation in soft materials, and soft phononic crystals

• 3D/4D printing and fabrication of soft materials

Keywords: material systems, solids and structure