Namiko Yamamoto's blog

I am Namiko Yamamoto, a 1st year PhD student in Aero/Astro department at MIT. I have been Aero/Astro major for both my BS and MS at MIT, also. I have taken ES240 (solid mechanics) with Prof. Suo this past fall, and have taken one solid mechanics class (2.071) at MIT. This is my first time learning about fracture mechanics. My weakness is that I don't know the material well, and even now I need to spend good time to understand the materials given in the lecture (notes and lectures are so helpful). My strength will be my motivation to learn the materials. It has been much fun in the class, and this learning will help me much in my research. For my PhD, I will be studying how to strengthen structural composites with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) under Professor Brian Wardle. In the current design, we will be investigating delamination fractures between prepregs. This class will be so helpful for this research, and further since I want to continue studying in materials/structure field beyong PhD.

16.223 Mechanics of Heterogeneous Materials

Course Description: Mechanical behavior of heterogeneous materials such as thin-film microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) materials and advanced filamentary composites, with particular emphasis on laminated structural configurations. Anisotropic and crystallographic elasticity formulations. Structure, properties and mechanics of constituents such as films, substrates, active materials, fibers, and matrices including nano- and micro-scale constituents. Effective properties from constituent properties. Classical laminated plate theory for modeling structural behavior including extrinsic and intrinsic strains and stresses such as environmental effects. Introduction to buckling of plates and nonlinear (deformations) plate theory. Other issues in modeling heterogeneous materials such as fracture/failure of laminated structures.

Please see the attached PDF document for ES240 project proposal.

Please see the attached documents for the presentation and report files for this project (updated on 12/16/2006).

“An Introduction to the Mechanics of Solids” by S. H. Crandall, N.C. Dahl, and T. J. Lardner

As the title explains, this book shows very basics of the solid mechanics. The book has a good coverage of the concepts of primary elements of mechanics, the three equations, some environmental effect, and examples of torsion, bending, and buckling. This book elaborately explains/proofs several important equations, whose procedures tend to be skipped in many courses due to time limitation. Various case studies/problems accompanied with suitable figures have always helped me to get better senses. It is also easy to find what I am looking for in the book with neatly sorted tables and index. And most importantly, I like this book since the book discusses engineering applications and the limitations of these models.

The materials given in ES240 exceed the range that this book can cover, but this book still is a good resource to go back to when I forget the basics since my sophomore year when I used as our textbook for the materials and structures.

I am a first year PhD student in Aeronautics and Astronautics department at MIT. I also have obtained B.S. and M.S. from the same department. I have taken one Solid Mechanics (graduate level) course at MIT, but since it did not cover waves/vibration or nonlinear plate theory, I look forward to these new topics later in the course very much. My most research work has been done at Technology Laboratory for Advanced Materials and Composites at MIT. My M.S. thesis topic was on micro solid oxide fuel cell. The goal was to design and fabricate thin film tri-layer fuel cell structure that is thermomechanically stable at high operation temperature. We started with mechanical testing to acquire properties, and designed membranes with von Karman plate theory. My PhD topic is nano-engineered composites with carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Solid mechanics is very directly related to these structural tasks including stiffness testing. Generally, having better sense of mechanics behind and having many analysis tools will be greatly helpful. So far I have been having much fun coming to Harvard, taking a little break from MIT (I have been there more than enough, although I still love it there). I hope to learn as much as possible from this course.