Research Statement-Dipl.-Ing.Johannes Schneider

I focused my studies on lightweight constructions and composites, especially on structures made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic. The idea of reducing the amount of resources needed to construct something and to reduce the energy consumption of the end product drives my work and research forward. In times where resources are becoming scarce and more expensive, it's time to think about new materials and possibilities in order to work toward energy efficiency, sustainability, and resilience.Micro-architected cellular composites inspired by natureand enabled by additive manufacturing are such novel materialswith greatpotential inenergy absorbing or biomedical applications. My work atKhalifaUniversity (Abu Dhabi, UAE), focuses on the modelling, manufacturing, macroscopic testing and characterization of micro-architected lattice structures.I conductFinite Element Analysis(FEA) using the software Abaqustosupporttheexperimental results and to performgeometry studies. For manufacturing lattice structures, we use avariety of different printing processes, includingselective laser sintering (SLS), fused deposition modeling (FDM), digital light processing (DLP), and PolyJet fusion.Common materials we use arePP, HDPE, PEEK, PA12, PLA,PEI,PlasGray, VeroWhite,TangoPlusand many material blends of those materials with carbon nano tubes (CNTs) or graphene nano platelets (GNPs) as well as carbon fibersto achieve self-sensingproperties.My studies are mainly focusingon the truss lattice structures such as Octet, Kelvinand Pentamode, as well as on plate lattice structures, simple cubic (SC), body centered cubic (BCC), face centered cubic (FCC), and Gyroid(Fig. 1).Alternating the relative density, unit cell size, material,and printing procedureare the main variables to analyzethose structure.With the Pentamode structure, ultra-lightweight structures could have been manufactured with arelative densityas low as 1 %(Fig. 2).In addition to 3D materials, self-sensing 2D auxetic structureswith negative poisonsratio were explored.Fig. 1. Variety of lattice structures, manufactured by digital light processingusing PlasGray with a relative density of 30%: a) Octet, b) Kelvin, c) Gyroid, d) SC, e) BCC, f) FCCFig. 2. Pentamode lattice structure with a relative density of 1.1 %: a) CAD model of a unit cell, b) scaffoldingforprinting, c) lattice structureA selection of my work at Khalifa University includes:-Multiscale characterization and constitutive parameters identification of polyamide (PA12) processed viaselective laser sintering-Performance of additive manufacturing-enabled micro-architected mechanical metamaterials