KEYNOTE LECTURE

Marco Paggi

IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy

Stretchable strain sensors have become increasingly critical in applications such as tactile sensing for bioinspired robots, human-machine interactions, biomedical instruments/tools, wearable healthcare systems, and diagnosis of rehabilitation of dermal diseases. The reliability of such sensors bonded or printed on compliant substrates (skin, textiles, polymers, paper) [1,2] strongly depends upon the mechanical compatibility of the sensor and the substrate materials. This lecture summarizes research results in the field of computational mechanics to develop accurate virtual testing methodologies [3,4] for the analysis of failure modes (debonding, cracking, etc.) in such devices, as a guide for reliability testing protocols.

1. JH Yuan, et al. (2016) A Mechanics Model for Sensors Imperfectly Bonded to the Skin for Determination of the Young’s Moduli of Epidermis and Dermis, J. Appl. Mech. 83, 084501.
2. C Casiraghi, et al. (2018) Inkjet printed 2D-crystal based strain gauges on paper. Carbon, 129:462-467.
3. T Guillén-Hernández, et al. (2019) Fracture analysis of thin films on compliant substrates: A numerical study using the phase field approach of fracture. Int. J. Pressure Vessels and Piping, 175:103913.
4. MR Marulli, et al. (2022) A combined phase-field and cohesive zone model approach for crack propagation in layered structures made of nonlinear rubber-like materials, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 395:115007.

Marco Paggi is a Full Professor of Structural Mechanics at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy. He serves as the Deputy Rector and directs both the Multi-scale Analysis of Materials (MUSAM) research unit and the MUSAM-Lab. He received his PhD in Structural Mechanics from the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2005. In 2010, he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship at Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. He has held visiting positions at several prestigious institutions, including Université Paris-Est (France), the University of Girona (Spain), the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (India), Tongji University (China). His research focuses on contact mechanics, fracture mechanics, and multiphysics simulations, with applications to a wide range of structural and material systems. He is author of over 250 peer-reviewed publications and has been the Principal Investigator of numerous EU-funded projects, including two prestigious grants from the European Research Council (ERC).