active
SDBOR CRG
Design of magnetic soft materials
Choosing where to put material and where to put magnetization, at the same time, so a soft structure moves the way a design problem asks it to.
Field-responsive materials
MatTO
Joint material and structural topology optimization for field-responsive soft materials, built on FEniCSx.
Active research software
GPL-3.0
Python
MatTO optimizes structural density, magnetic particle fraction and remanent magnetization direction together, rather than choosing a geometry first and then a material. It is built on FEniCSx with adjoint objective derivatives, density filtering and projection, and an MMA optimizer.
The design variables and the energy density are exposed through a generic interface, so a new constitutive model becomes an input rather than a fork. Worked examples cover magnetorheological and magnetoactive elastomers and liquid-crystal elastomers under prescribed stimulus.
Developed with Ian Galloway; version 0.2.0 credits both authors. The restorative-beam design behind Ian Galloway et al. (2026) was produced with it.
Current limits. Sensitivity analysis does not yet support state-dependent constraints, and contact and phase-field constraints are future work. No coupled-field solve or 3D validation is claimed.
Who
- Ian Galloway Master's Researcher
Related work
active
Failure and fatigue in magnetic soft materials
Magnetic soft composites are designed as if the particle–matrix interface were perfect. This project asks what changes when it is not, and whether that is what sets how long the material keeps working.
Field-responsive materials · Fracture & failure
active
Adhesion of field-responsive materials
A pull-off force is one number describing at least four different mechanisms. Separating them is what lets a measurement support a design rule that transfers, instead of one fitted curve.
Field-responsive materials
Publications
- Ian Galloway, Prashant K. Jha, Model-Informed Joint Material-Structural Optimization of Hard-Magnetic Soft Materials, arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.14397, 2026.