Publications by Tian Chen | EPFL Graph Search

Leveraging the Snap Buckling of Bistable Magnetic Shells to Design a Refreshable Braille Dot

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Arefeh Abbasi, Tian Chen, Bastien Freddy Gustave Aymon

A design concept is proposed for the building block, a dot, of programmable braille readers utilizing bistable shell buckling, magnetic actuation, and pneumatic loading. The design process is guided by Finite Element simulations, which are initially valida ...

Wiley2023

BamX: Rethinking Deployability in Architecture through Weaving

Mark Pauly, Stefana Parascho, Seiichi Eduardo Suzuki Erazo, Yingying Ren, Tian Chen

Deployable gridshells are a class of planar-to-spatial structures that achievea 3D curved geometry by inducing bending on a flat grid of elastic beams. However, theslender nature of these beams often conflicts with the structure’s load-bearing capacity.To ...

De Gruyter2023

Indentation and stability of woven domes

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Célestin Vallat, Tian Chen, Tomohiko Sano, Samuel Jean Bernard Poincloux

Discrete domes are doubly curved structures comprising a network of beam-like elements. We study the mechanics of discrete domes made of ribbons woven in a pentagonal triaxial pattern. Experiments and finite element simulations are performed to characteriz ...

ELSEVIER2023

From kirigami to hydrogels: a tutorial on designing conformally transformable surfaces

Tian Chen, Yingying Ren, Yue Wang

Elastic surfaces that morph between multiple geometrical configurations are of significant engineering value, with applications ranging from the deployment of space-based PV arrays, the erection of temporary shelters, and the realization of flexible displa ...

2023

Umbrella Meshes: Elastic Mechanisms for Freeform Shape Deployment

Mark Pauly, Florin Isvoranu, Uday Kusupati, Yingying Ren, Tian Chen, Davide Pellis

We present a computational inverse design framework for a new class of volumetric deployable structures that have compact rest states and deploy into bending-active 3D target surfaces. Umbrella meshes consist of elastic beams, rigid plates, and hinge joint ...

2022

Smooth Triaxial Weaving with Naturally Curved Ribbons

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Tian Chen, Samuel Jean Bernard Poincloux

Triaxial weaving is a handicraft technique that has long been used to create curved structures using initially straight and flat ribbons. Weavers typically introduce discrete topological defects to produce nonzero Gaussian curvature, albeit with faceted su ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2021

Modulation of perovskite crystallization processes towards highly efficient and stable perovskite solar cells with MXene quantum dot-modified SnO2

Michael Graetzel, Shaik Mohammed Zakeeruddin, Ulf Anders Hagfeldt, Yuhang Liu, Tian Chen, Haizhou Lu, Jaeki Jeong

Nanocrystalline tin (iv) oxide (SnO2) electron-transport layers (ETL) have shown great potential for achieving highly efficient, stable perovskite solar cells (PSCs), in particular low-temperature-processed flexible PSCs. Recently, studies have further sho ...

2021

Computational Inverse Design of Surface-based Inflatables

Mark Pauly, Florin Isvoranu, Tian Chen, Francis Julian Panetta

We present a computational inverse design method for a new class of surface-based inflatable structure. Our deployable structures are fabricated by fusing together two layers of inextensible sheet material along carefully selected curves. The fusing curves ...

2021

A reprogrammable mechanical metamaterial with stable memory

Mark Pauly, Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Tian Chen

Metamaterials are designed to realize exotic physical properties through the geometric arrangement of their underlying structural layout(1,2). Traditional mechanical metamaterials achieve functionalities such as a target Poisson's ratio(3) or shape transfo ...

2021

Bistable Auxetic Surface Structures

Mark Pauly, Tian Chen, Francis Julian Panetta, Max Schnaubelt

We present Bistable Auxetic Surface Structures, a novel deployable material system based on optimized bistable auxetic cells. Such a structure can be flat-fabricated from elastic sheet material, then deployed towards a desired double-curved target shape by ...

2021