Mike Ciavarella's blog

Professor Huajian Gao of Brown University speaks at MIT Distinguished Seminar Series (March 2016).

It is a unique opportunity to enjoy the many important recent achievements of Huajian's group.

Mechanics as an Enabling tool in bioinspired materials and biological interactions of nanomaterials

Here.

Not to be missed!

A generalized Johnson parameter for pull-off decay in the adhesion of rough surfaces

I do not think in Imechanica there has been an obituary for Paul Paris, whose work in fatigue crack propagation is extraordinary and one of the few important and lasting contributions ----- today our aircrafts, both civil and military, all rely on "damage tolerance", which is based on Paris' law.   Paris' law, as every great innovations, was published in 1961 only after rejection by three of the leading journals in the fracture mechanics field.  It bears the name of "law" although of course it is not like Newton's law.  It is a power law, based perhaps on what Barenblatt calls "incomplete"

1 phd position for phd is reserved to non-italian citizens at Politecnico department of Mechanical engineering.

Attached the SELECTION CALL FOR ADMISSION TO THE RESEARCH DOCTORATE (Ph.D.) PROGRAMS – XXXIII CYCLE AT THE POLITECNICO DI BARI ACADEMIC YEAR 2017/2018 

Various options for research themes are available, also including solid mechanics, fatigue or contact mechanics.

See attachment or write for details at mciava AT poliba.it

Application expires on Sept.12 !!

Michele Ciavarella  Yang Xu Robert L. Jackson

Some Closed-Form Results for Adhesive Rough Contacts Near Complete Contact on Loading and Unloading in the Johnson, Kendall, and Roberts Regime

Journal of Tribology Copyright VC 2018 by ASME JANUARY 2018, Vol. 140 / 011402-1

Recently, generalizing the solution of the adhesiveless random rough contact proposed

by Xu, Jackson, and Marghitu (XJM model), the first author has obtained a model for

adhesive contact near full contact, under the Johnson, Kendall, and Roberts (JKR)

Dear colleagues,

We provide a very simple result for a problem which has been often neglected (variable amplitude loading) in academia, but which is of paramount importance in real engineering situations, where fatigue is almost never "constant amplitude".

We found few cases where we could check this extremely simple result, but it worked very well.  We would welcome further verifications.

The paper is in press here.

See here.

The top italian engineer Davide Bigoni gets his 4th cover in Proc. Roy. Soc. A in just 18 months 

See here.

Maybe because I am proud of Betti's theorem being italian, I am curious about this big emphasys on systems violating it.  They may "open avenues for energy absorption, conversion and harvesting, soft robotics, prosthetics and optomechanics".... ?  I'd be curious to hear some comments.   Anyway, the last author Andrea Alu is anyway italian like Betti.

Abstract Submission Extended to March 1st 2017

More information