Dr. Pinar Acar
Associate Professor
Mechanical Engineering Department
https://me.vt.edu/people/faculty/acar-pinar.html
Abstract
The growing demand for high-performance materials in electronics, energy, structural applications, and extreme environments has intensified interest in computational and data-driven materials design strategies. The research on engineering materials and their manufacturing will potentially extend in the future to the development of new-generation composites, alloys, ceramics, and other materials for extreme environments such as hypersonics applications, fabrication of adaptive thermal response materials, energetic composites in fuel cells, thermal energy harvesting in satellites, and materials for green energy applications with the use of computational and data-driven design strategies.
This talk will provide an overview of the multi-scale computational methods developed by Dr. Acar’s research group to design metallic microstructures and mechanical metamaterials with enhanced mechanical properties. A key focus will be on the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in accelerating materials design. The discussion will also examine how manufacturing constraints shape the design process, with a focus on constructing material property closures that map feasible and processable design spaces. By integrating AI with physics-based computational approaches, this research aims to bridge the gap between computational materials design and manufacturing processes, paving the way for more efficient and reliable material systems.
About Dr. Pinar Acar
Pinar Acar is an Associate Professor at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on multi-scale materials modeling, materials design, design optimization, uncertainty quantification, and machine learning. She received her Ph.D. degree in 2017 from the Aerospace Engineering Department of the University of Michigan. During her Ph.D., she developed various computational methods for studying the multi-scale modeling and design of metals.
Dr. Acar is the winner of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, the Dean’s Awards of Excellence: Faculty Fellow and Outstanding New Assistant Professor Awards at Virginia Tech, Frontiers of Materials Award by The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), and the International Amelia Earhart Fellowship, as well as the recipient of the best paper awards at AIAA SciTech Forum 2022 and 2025. She is an elected member of technical committees in various professional societies, including the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS), The U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), and The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).