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About

Sankalp Gour is an emerging researcher whose work sits at the intersection of soft robotics, smart materials, and nonlinear mechanics, with a particular focus on the mechanical behavior of electro-active polymers (EAPs) and artificial soft tissues. His research addresses some of the most challenging problems in designing human-like soft robots, including fracture, failure, and instability phenomena in complex material systems. Gour's most influential contribution, "Constitutive modeling for the tear fracture of artificial tissues in human-like soft robots" (2022, 29 citations), established critical frameworks for predicting how soft, tissue-like materials fracture under realistic loading conditions. Complementing this, his physics-based failure studies extend these insights into practical robotics applications. A significant thread running through his work is the investigation of wrinkling instabilities — particularly unequal-biaxial taut states — in electro-active polymeric composites and functionally graded dielectric elastomers, areas largely unexplored before his contributions. More recently, Gour has ventured into coupled multi-physics problems, examining thermo-electrostrictive and thermo-electro-magnetostrictive deformation instabilities, reflecting the growing complexity of next-generation smart material systems. With over 60 cumulative citations across six papers, his work is rapidly gaining recognition as foundational to the mechanics of intelligent soft materials.