A manuscript with Ian Galloway on model-informed joint material–structural optimization of hard-magnetic soft materials has been submitted, and the preprint is on arXiv.
Ian is the first author. The work began as undergraduate research and grew through an REU into a master’s project; this is its first manuscript.
The argument it makes is about order. A hard-magnetic soft material can be described by several different constitutive models, and they do not agree, so the design that optimization returns depends on which one was chosen. The manuscript therefore compares seven effective shear-modulus relations against three strain-energy functions on actuation problems, and uses experimental stress–strain data to select a shear-modulus relation before the joint optimization of structural density, magnetic particle fraction and remanent-magnetization direction.
The comparison itself comes from putting two traditions side by side — classical effective-modulus relations, some of them dating to the 1950s, and constrained-kinematics models — and then selecting among them against experimental stress–strain data rather than by preference.
The optimization software is Ian’s, built on FEniTop and FEniCSx and released alongside the paper. The work was supported by NSF ERI and SDBOR CRG awards.