Professor Pavana Prabhakar has a joint appointment within Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering at UW-Madison, where She leads the Manufacturing and Mechanics Lab (MaMeL). The overarching goal is to enable damage-tolerant and resilient lightweight composite materials for aircrafts, marine vessels, automobiles, etc. The focus is on establishing fundamental knowledge about how composites behave in multi-physics environments, including dynamic impact, extreme temperatures (high/low), and moisture, and use that to design novel architected composite materials. To that end, the lab conducts foundational research on mechanics-based materials designs (computationally and experimentally) of architected polymer composites and their fabrication by advancing relevant manufacturing techniques. Their research occurs at the intersection of advanced manufacturing, solid mechanics, materials science, and computational science that result in the design and fabrication of structural and functional parts.
Professor Prabhakar on YouTube: https://youtu.be/U0gxw8oso9U