IRG2 focuses on the nonlinear interplay between a deformable boundary and imposed stresses, an outstanding issue in engineering and materials processing. The IRG will investigate shape transitions involving deformations of thin sheets of material and explore extreme states of forcing where current understanding is meager. We benefit from the unprecedented availability of high-resolution, high-speed image processing as well as our recent discovery that meory effects can dominate new classes of transition dynamics often appearing as instabilities. These instablilities represent opportunities, using far-from equilibrium dynamics, to shape materials in ways that can be more effective than explicit constraints to create structure on the mm and nm scale, where explicit shaping is impractical.
