In this thesis, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into structural instabilities of both elastic and magneto-elastic beams and shells, resulting in a creative proposal to design a programmable braille reader. Methodologically, we combine numerical si ...
One-dimensional materials have gained much attention in the last decades: from carbon nanotubes to ultrathin nanowires to few-atom atomic chains, these can all display unique electronic properties and great potential for next-generation applications. Exfol ...
A large part of building demolitions is motivated by purely socio-economic reasons. Hence, about-to-be-demolished structures, commonly made of reinforced concrete, very often present no or little degradation. When adaptive reuse of the entire building is n ...
Materials that efficiently promote the thermodynamically uphill water-splitting reaction under solar illumination are essential for generating carbon-free ("green") hydrogen. Mapping out the combinatorial space of potential photocatalysts for this reaction ...
Data-driven approaches have been applied to reduce the cost of accurate computational studies on materials, by using only a small number of expensive reference electronic structure calculations for a representative subset of the materials space, and using ...
Strain is an inevitable phenomenon in two-dimensional (2D) material, regardless of whether the film is suspended or supported. Moreover, strain is known to alter the physical and chemical properties, such as the band gap, charge carrier effective masses, d ...
Non-linear materials are cornerstones of modern optics and electronics. Strong dependence on the intrinsic properties of particular materials, however, inhibits the at-will extension of demanding non-linear effects, especially those second-order ones, to w ...
Conventional formworks for concrete curved shells either are expensive, complex and wasteful or have formal restrictions. Using tile vaults (also known as timbrel, Guastavino, thin-tile or Catalan vaults) as stay-in-place formwork for concrete shells could ...
Promisingapplications in photonics are driven by the ability tofabricate crystal-quality metal thin films of controlled thicknessdown to a few nanometers. In particular, these materials exhibit ahighly nonlinear response to optical fields owing to the indu ...
Recent advances on low-dimensional and topological materials has greatly inspired the research in condensed matter physics. This thesis is devoted to the computational and theoretical study of topological effects in two-dimensional materials, especially na ...