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Manufactured granular materials
Marc Miskin, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, manufactured granular materials of various shapes in a 3-D printer to test their aggregate properties when jammed into a confined space.
Miskin works in the lab of Heinrich Jaeger, a professor at UChicago who examines materials and phenomena that appear simple at the surface, but which reveal tremendous complexity upon close examination. For example, "jamming," the phenomenon in which aggregates of randomly placed particles, including spheres or more complicated shapes, or even molecules, transition from fluid-like to solid-like behavior. Jamming lends itself to soft robotics.
To read more about this research, see the UChicago news story Turning computer models into reality. (Date of Image: Unknown)
Credit: Robert Kozloff, University of Chicago
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