Bio

Jeffrey Lloyd is a graduate student at Georgia Tech getting his master’s in mechanical engineering, specifically in plastic deformation in polycrystals (metals). He believes that a comprehensive study of the world of simple programs will yield results and discoveries in materials much faster than studying large-scale behavior, as this will only tell what the whole system is doing, and not how to design against what happens. Besides his studies, he enjoys playing rugby, racquetball, traveling, etc.

Project: Investigating Self-Organizing Behavior in Solids Due to Defects

The system that will be investigated is the model of a solid to which an external load can be applied, and this load will be resolved using Boolean arrows that operate on a hexagonal grid. An informed guess is that a nearest-neighbor hexagonal grid is necessary to model the interaction between forces in different directions correctly. To look at the complicated behavior that this system implies, defects will be introduced into the system in the form of vacancies and cracks, and the self-organizing behavior of these defects will be modeled. There will be a total of two pieces of information that each point on the grid can have. The first dictates whether or not there is material there. The second describes the force at that point.

Potential rules will first be whittled down with guesses that seem physically plausible. The remaining rules will then be enumerated, and their behavior will be examined to see whether any match physically observed phenomenon.

After this, the initial conditions and randomness of the system will be altered, and their effect will be observed. Expected behavior includes the propagation of cracks, and the coalescence of vacancies into volumetric voids.

Favorite Three-Color Cellular Automaton

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