Erik van der Linden

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About

Erik van der Linden is a leading researcher in the field of mechanical metamaterials, with a focus on harnessing instabilities and nonlinear elastic effects for novel engineering applications. His work centers on the design of architected materials that exhibit counterintuitive mechanical behaviors, such as auxeticity—the property of becoming thicker when stretched. In his highly cited 2024 study on "Suppressing torsional buckling in auxetic meta-shells" (30 citations), van der Linden demonstrated a groundbreaking method to prevent the catastrophic torsional buckling that plagues thin cylindrical shells, a failure mode critical in contexts from arterial blood flow to aerospace structures. By leveraging auxetic lattice architectures, he showed that this instability can be systematically suppressed, offering a new paradigm for robust shell design. In parallel, his 2021 work on "Inverted and Programmable Poynting Effects in Metamaterials" (3 citations) pioneers the ability to design and invert the Poynting effect—a classic nonlinear coupling between shear and normal deformation—in engineered structures. This opens doors to programmable materials with tailored shear-normal responses, with implications for soft robotics and adaptive structures. Van der Linden’s research elegantly bridges fundamental mechanics with practical, design-driven solutions, establishing him as a rising figure in the mechanics of metamaterials.