With NSF CAREER award, Plummer uses phase transitions to understand metamaterials for imperfect environments
By Patrick L. Kennedy
Assistant Professor Abigail Plummer (ME, MSE) has earned a prestigious NSF CAREER award to help her develop an advanced tool kit that might someday be used to build the next generation of intelligent materials.
The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development awards—known as CAREER awards for short—are prestigious and highly competitive grants for early-career researchers who have demonstrated potential to advance their fields.
Plummer is a materials expert who has studied swelling hydrogels and expanding foams, among other topics, and with the CAREER award, she seeks to expand our understanding of metamaterials.
Metamaterials are man-made materials with properties not found in nature, such as ultra-stiffness or the ability to deform or change shape. As Plummer explains it, these properties are due to the materials’ precisely designed geometry.
A handful of elite researchers such as MSE Division Head and Associate Professor Keith Brown (ME, MSE) and Distinguished Professor of Engineering Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE) have managed to create materials with remarkable qualities, such as the strongest material ever, in terms of energy-absorbing efficiency; and a material that blocks noise without restricting air flow.
However, there is yet no unifying framework for modeling how existing or proposed metamaterials might be adapted to have multiple functions, or how they are expected to perform under an onslaught of unpredictable conditions. With nearly $700,000 in NSF funds over the next five years, Plummer seeks to build just such a framework. She and the students in her lab will be simulating and building what you might call practice metamaterials that are analogous to others under development, and subject them to disorder, perturbations, and noise.
Plummer will leverage her background in statistical physics and phase transitions as she and her team learn how precisely designed materials will respond in these complicated settings. “What we want to do is what many scientists throughout history have done, which is to see if we can apply knowledge from a mature field to an emerging field in order to make progress,” she says. “In this case, statistical physics is that mature field. We want to systematically evaluate analogies between metamaterials and classic phase transition models to figure out how useful they are, and also what their limitations are.”
The results of these tests will help Plummer and colleagues build the unifying framework—a kind of tool kit, or perhaps better, an advanced cookbook—that will equip downstream researchers creating tomorrow’s multi-functional materials. This framework might be the key to achieving intelligent materials—materials that follow designers’ rules for behavior in varying situations.
“Intelligent—or mechano-intelligent—materials would be able to sense things, and not just sense things but act on that information to make decisions,” says Plummer. “That’s a grand challenge in mechanics, because it can still be difficult to make a material that can perform a single function well, especially in an environment with a lot of noise [or] defects.
“If you could actually make mechano-intelligent materials,” Plummer continues, “the sky is the limit for what you could do,” with possibilities encompassing transformative technologies in robotics, medical devices, and advanced manufacturing.
Plummer will leverage her background in statistical physics as she and her team learn how precisely designed materials will respond to various stimuli. The project combines theory, experimentation, and simulation, and it builds on the work Plummer’s team did on a Haythornthwaite Research Initiation Grant in 2024. The CAREER award will help Plummer’s lab buy new equipment, hire a graduate student, and engage in STEM outreach efforts as well.
“The CAREER award will be essential in moving this project forward,” says Plummer. “The Haythornthwaite grant allowed us to generate the preliminary results for our proposal to NSF, and now we’ll be making a sustained, five-year effort that will allow us to study this topic thoroughly and advance scientific knowledge.”