Contact manu@seas.upenn.edu for the Zoom link.
Cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) are a nanomaterial obtained from plant sources and have excellent mechanical properties, high aspect ratios, and are biodegradable. As a reinforcing phase, CNFs have the potential to improve the mechanical properties of polymer materials. The overarching objective of this thesis is to investigate the use of CNFs to enhance the strength and […]
How will swimming microorganisms affect the mixing of a diffusive contaminant in chaotic flows? Answers to this question can lead to improved understanding of the spread of pollutants (e.g. algal blooms) in oceans and lakes, as well as potentially useful applications in biofuel and vaccine productions. In this talk, I present recent experiments on the […]
About the Series: The Quantum Engineering Summer Seminar Series is hosted by the Quantum Engineering Graduate Association (QEGA) every Friday at 12:00 - 1:00 pm EDT throughout the summer months and will be followed by a separate Fall series. The series invites leading world leading experts across academia, industry, and government working on experimental, theoretical, […]
Contact manu@seas.upenn.edu for the Zoom link.
Sedimentation of active matter is found in many natural and industrial processes. It plays an important role on the distribution of plankton in oceans, which is key part of the carbon cycle (i.e. ocean's biological pump) that transports carbon from the ocean's surface to depth. In this seminar, I will present an investigation on the […]
Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is a van der Waals material that hosts defect-based quantum emitters (QEs) at room temperature, providing an unparalleled platform for realizing devices for quantum technologies and studying light-matter interactions. Recent observations suggest the existence of multiple distinct defect structures responsible for QEs. Theoretical proposals suggest vacancies, substitutional atoms, and their complexes as likely […]
Robots have the capability to sense and track natural phenomena for environmental monitoring, deepening our understanding of the world. Robotic modeling of such phenomena is essential to operating in complex environments, allowing robots to perform in more realistic scenarios. Thus, representing complex environments is paramount to the success of multi-robot teams. While considerable efforts have […]
Origami robots are machines whose morphologies and functions are created by folding locally flat sheets. This thesis makes three contributions to the design and fabrication of origami robots aimed at the development of an automated computational pipeline for the specification and construction of widely different morphologies and body sizes capable of highly dynamic operation. The […]
About the Series: The Quantum Engineering Summer Seminar Series is hosted by the Quantum Engineering Graduate Association (QEGA) every Friday at 12:00 - 1:00 pm EDT throughout the summer months and will be followed by a separate Fall series. The series invites leading world leading experts across academia, industry, and government working on experimental, theoretical, […]
Contact manu@seas.upenn.edu for the Zoom link.
Modular robots offer the promise of flexibility; we will be able to deploy teams of generalist modules and reconfigure them into various specialists to perform whatever task is necessary. Surface swimming aquatic modular robots in particular are not well studied, however, because the literature assumes that the modules need to be holonomic, which makes them […]