Mustafa Alshaqaq

Mustafa Alshaqaq’s research group at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, is recruiting PhD students for the August 2027 intake. The group develops structures that control the propagation, localization and concentration of vibrations and elastic waves, with an emphasis on tunable and reconfigurable dynamic behavior. The research combines smart materials, electrical circuits and rigorous mechanics to design structures whose response can be tuned or reprogrammed without changing their geometry. Students may work on elastic-wave and metamaterial systems, including piezoelectric and electromechanical metamaterials, graded and reconfigurable metastructures, wave localization, trapping and guiding, bandgap engineering for low-frequency vibration control, and topological or nonreciprocal wave phenomena. Additional projects address smart structures and dynamics, such as piezoelectric shunt circuits, synthetic impedance, vibration energy harvesting, vibration of continuous systems, and reduced-order or finite-element modeling of electromechanical structures. The group provides an interdisciplinary environment spanning mechanical engineering, materials science, applied mechanics, physics and electrical engineering.