Hutchens Research Lab

Category: Research

  • Cut Surfaces Presented at 2023 SES Annual Conference

    Cut Surfaces Presented at 2023 SES Annual Conference

    The collaborative team including PI Shelby Hutchens and CoPI Alison Dunn as well as graduate students Sri Sridhar, Shaobo Zhan, Nabila Ali, and NSF-funded undergraduate intern Grace Federici attended the SES Annual Conference in Minneapolis, MN. There they presented on recent efforts in advancing the Y-shaped cutting technique (a how to!) and quantification of surfaces produced during cutting. The long term goal is to try to link the damage produced at the surface with the conditions during the cutting and eventually try to learn how this might affect the cut surfaces’ frictional responses.

    Take a look at some of our instagram videos demonstrating research techniques used in this project.
  • Undergraduate Research Symposium

    Undergraduate Research Symposium

    Steven Yang and Davin Bahk presented some of their latest work at the Undergraduate Research Symposium on Thursday, April 27. They are working on developing the cavitation rheology technique to determine the failure behavior of ultra-soft materials, materials that are difficult or otherwise impossible to characterize using traditional failure testing techniques.

    Davin Bahk (left) and Steven Yang (right) present their poster on “Analysis of crack strain energies of rheological materials through cavitation-pressure experiments.”

  • Prof. Hutchens gives departmental seminar at the University of Iowa

    Prof. Hutchens gives departmental seminar at the University of Iowa

    As part of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department’s departmental seminar series, Prof. Hutchens gave a talk on injection-initiated fracture, also known as the cavitation rheology technique. She presented on how to obtain fracture energy for ultrasoft materials, having < kPa moduli, as detailed in her recent Soft Matter article with postdoc advisor Al Crosby. She then showed recent results on quantifying and predicting crack morphologies obtained by undergraduate researcher Steven Yang.

    U-Iowa Departmental Seminar Series

  • Prof. Hutchens Receives NSF Grant

    Prof. Hutchens Receives NSF Grant

    NSF logoProf. Hutchens received funding for work entitled “Experimental Measurement of Tearing and Cutting in Highly Deformable Solids Relating to the Mechanical Origin of Crack Blunting-Mediated Toughness.” This work aims to elucidate crack-tip mediated mechanisms governing fracture in rubbery materials by controlling the geometry of the crack-tip using experimental cutting techniques. Work will be extended to needle-mediated cutting and puncture. These experiments will provide undergraduate students the opportunity to learn cutting-edge mechanical testing techniques.