My PhD was about energy-absorbing thin-walled structures, which involve tubes, beams, and sandwich panels, pursuing high and flat force-displacement curves. Now my interest expands from high energy absorption to arbitrarily prescribable force-displacement curves and their applications (energy-vibration integrated absorption, MEMS).

1. Energy-absorbing thin-walled structures 

Reference papers:

1. Y. Li, Z. You*, External inversion of thin-walled corrugated tubes. International Journal of Mechanical Sciences (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmecsci.2018.05.044

2. Y. Li*, Z. You, Open-section origami beams for energy absorption, International Journal of Mechanical Sciences (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmecsci.2019.05.006

3. Y. Li*, Z. You, Origami concave tubes for energy absorption, International Journal of Solids and Structures (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2019.03.026

4. J. Cheng, Y. Li*. Foldcore structures with origami initiators for energy-absorbing sandwich panels. Acta Mech. Solida Sin (2023), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10338-023-00396-x

2. Metastructures with arbitrarily prescribable force-displacement curves

Reference papers:

1. Q. Chen#, K. Tan#, X. He, A. Chen, Y. Li*, Metastructures based on graded tube inversion for arbitrarily prescribable force-displacement relationships, Extreme Mechanics Letters (2024), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eml.2024.102174

2. Hui Li, Wei Li, Huixin Yang, Joseph M. Gattas, Qingyang Chen, Yang Li*. One-DOF Mechanical Metamaterials with Arbitrary Prescribability and Rapid Reprogrammability of Force-Displacement Curves. Research. DOI:10.34133/research.0715

3. Hu, Xinyu, Kexin Tan, Yuhang Yang, Qingyang Chen, and Yang Li*. "A" peak-valley-control" strategy for customizing force-displacement relationships." Engineering Structures 344 (2025): 121389. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engstruct.2025.121389