Taubman College It was recently announced that Sean Ahlquist, Assistant Professor of Architecture, will collaborate with professors Anthony Waas and Georg Essl on a MCubed collaboration titled, “Mechanical Properties and Computational Methods for Composites Formed of Pre-stressed Knitted Textiles.”
This research proposes the design of pre-stressed CNC knitted textiles for reinforcements in structural composites, for such uses as tailored lightweight structural skins, examining manufacturing methods, testing their mechanical properties, and developing computational methods for simulating their performance.
Ahlquist’s collaborators on the project are: Anthony M. Waas, Felix Pawlowski Collegiate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and; Georg Essl, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering.
Ahlquist is a part of the Cluster in Computational Media and Interactive Systems which connects Architecture with the fields of Material Science, Computer Science, Art & Design and Music. His particular research thread is centered on the topic of material computation, in developing means by which complex material behaviors can be instrumentalized to formulate integrated and variable spatial capacities.
Visit the description of the project on the MCubed site.
MCubed is a two-year seed-funding program designed to empower interdisciplinary teams of University of Michigan faculty to pursue new initiatives with major societal impact. The program minimizes the time between idea conception and successful research results by providing immediate startup funds for novel, high-risk and transformative research projects. The funds are intended to generate data for groundbreaking, high-impact publications, or preliminary results for new, innovative research proposals. The program also includes high-visibility, campus-wide research symposia to showcase the resulting groundbreaking research.
