Assistant Professor Aditya Kumar has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), one of the foundation's most prestigious honors for early-career faculty.
The award provides $638,740 over five years to support Kumar’s research project, “Linking Macroscopic Fracture to the Microscopic Behavior in Soft Composites.”
Kumar’s research focuses on understanding how composite materials fracture and fail based on their internal structure. The long-term goal is to enable a more predictive approach to designing stronger and more fracture-resistant materials.
“It’s an honor to receive this award,” Kumar said. “It provides my group with support to pursue this important fundamental problem with the time and depth it requires. I am deeply grateful to NSF and to my students, collaborators, and mentors at Georgia Tech and beyond.”
Composites are made by combining two or more materials at the microscopic scale to improve properties such as stiffness, strength, and toughness. For decades, materials scientists and engineers have sought to predict how the arrangement and properties of these constituents govern the behavior of the overall material.
Assistant Professor Aditya Kumar
However, Kumar said that because this connection is extremely complex, the development of new composite materials has still relied heavily on extensive experimental testing and iterative design.
“This project aims to build new mathematical and computational models that accurately connect what happens at the microscopic level to the overall strength and fracture resistance of the material,” Kumar said. “In simpler terms, we want to understand how the “recipe” of a composite material determines how it breaks. That understanding could eventually help engineers design tougher, more reliable composites with greater confidence.”
Kumar will focus on “soft” composites, in which one part of the composite is a soft material such as natural rubber. The research utilizes Kumar’s recently developed fracture-modeling framework, which predicts both where new cracks form and how existing cracks grow, and enables the study of complex cracking mechanisms in soft composites for the first time.
Today, developing new materials for applications in infrastructure, aerospace, energy, and transportation is a slow and expensive process. Through this research, Kumar aims to enable engineers to use computational tools to screen and design materials before they are manufactured and tested. This could eventually reduce early-stage materials development from a process that often takes months or years to one completed in weeks or even days.
“In the long term, I hope this research will contribute to a more systematic science of material design,” Kumar said. “Rather than discovering fracture-resistant materials primarily through trial and error, the goal is to move toward a future where fracture properties can be deliberately designed from the bottom up.”
As part of the project, Kumar aims to build a pathway for students from high school to graduate school to engage with mechanics, computational modeling, and material design.
The multi-tiered educational program will include an AI-enabled “material recipe” app that draws on the project’s findings to help users explore how different microscopic material combinations influence properties such as stiffness, strength, and toughness.
Educational activities, supported through CEISMC, will provide research opportunities for high school students and professional development for teachers. The outreach program will also strengthen connections between academic research and industry through workshops with industry professionals and development of short courses and open-source instructional material on advanced research topics.