Thomas C.T. Ting, Professor Emeritus, the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Consulting Professor, Stanford University

For significant contributions to the development of the Stroh formalism of anisotropic elasticity, and to the analyses of several fundamental inelastic and wave propagation problems

Professor Thomas C.T. Ting received B.S. in Civil Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1956, and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 1962. He was appointed as Assistant Professor at Brown University between 1963 and 1965. He then joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was promoted through the academic ranks to Professor in 1970. He has been Professor Emeritus since 2001. He has received visiting appointments at a number of universities, including National Taiwan University, The University of East Anglia, University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui, Tongji University, Harbin Institute of Technology, and Sanford University.

Hello,

The 53rd Congress of the Indian Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (an International Meet) is slated to be held during last week of December 2008, in Hyderabad, India. The last date for sending in both the abstracts and the full-length papers is 30th September, 2008.

People from outside India are especially encouraged to participate. Hyderabad is well connected by flights. Usually, the ISTAM conferences are low on budget but high on enthusiasm. The ISTAM conferences typically cover a broad range of topics.

The Conference will be held in University  of Technical Education, Hochiminh City

1,  Vo Van Ngan, Thu Duc, Hochiminh City, Vietnam

There are two positions available for doctoral studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Michigan State University.  Two-year fundings are secured for those positions.  Research area is computational mechanics, especially for wave propagation and  structural response under extreme loadings.  Contact: Professor Jung-Wuk Hong at Michigan State University.  Email: jwh@egr.msu.edu

Dear all,

         I am new to X-FEM, started reading papers a couple of weeks before. I understood, functions[heaviside,sign..] are used to enrich the nodes to simulate virtually the discontinuity and asymptotic functions are used to charecterize the crack tip,other than this regular FEM nodes are there. I have few questions. 

1.what is the role of the asymptotic functions and its unknown co-efficient 'b' in charecterizing the crack tip. What are the parameters do these functions exactly charecterize means wat are the details can we extract from these fns n co-effs?

The Adhesion Society will hold its 32nd Annual Meeting in Savannah, GA February 15-18, 2009; uniting chemists, physicists, mechanists, engineers, and biologists concerned with the design and characterization of materials interfaces and their associated property of adhesion.  Adhesion and interfacial constrol are key to the development of nano- and bio- based technologies as well structural and cosmetic applications that influence society in everyday life. 

Professor Chad M. Landis, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, The University of Texas at Austin

For outstanding contributions to the mechanics of active materials

Professor Chad Landis received his bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering and business from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. He then went on to earn his MS (1997) and PhD (1999) degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara. After spending a year and a half at Harvard University as a post-doc, he then went to Rice University where he was a member of the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science faculty from 2000-2006. He is now an Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

I have been told about "Spin Softening" option for rotating cylinders in Ansys but did not really understand how/what/why. I have gone thru Ansys documentation and it appears that the centrifugal loads are applied to the deformed configuration if the Spin Softening option is selected. Does Abaqus have a similar option ?

Now what the "Spin Softening" is meant to do is apply a centrifugal force:

F(r) = density*(r+u)*speed^2

where u is the radial deformation. Most classical equations ignore this and assume that the force is applied only on the undeformed configuration.

Three types of constitutive models have been developed during the past decades including the phenomenological model, the micromechanical model and the microscopic thermodynamical model. In these phenomenological model type, we may find the cosine model (Liang and Rogers, 1990), the modified cosine model with decomposed Martensite volume fraction for the twinned part and the detwinned part (Brinson and Lammering, 1993), the exponential model (Boyd and Lagoudas, 1994) and the polynomial model. The microscopic thermodynamical model provides a unified constitutive framework from which many models can be derived (Qidwai and Lagoudas, 2000).

Post-Doctoral Fellowship: Looking for energetic researchers with strong background in constitutive modeling or multiscale material simulations. Specialty on fatigue and fracture of metals, polymer or short fiber composites is a plus.  The primary research will be focused on physics-based damage, fracture, and fatigue modeling and simulations at various scales.  If interested, please contact Dr. Yibin Xue via email or visit her website.

The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (HSEAS) seeks applicants for openings at the level of tenure-track assistant professors in mechanics in association with all areas of engineering. The ideal candidate will have high expertise in fluid and/or solid mechanics and will also have a demonstrated commitment to significant and innovative applications in engineering.  Here is a pdf file of this advertisement.  We would be grateful if you could print and post it in your Department.

I post some (hand-written) notes on compatibility conditions for both small and finite strains that I have used for helping me in lecturing. These may be useful for our student friends on imechanica. I also post a paper on compatibility conditions for the Left Cauchy-Green field in three dimensions as well as the paper by Janet Blume on the same subject.

recommend more references about this topic: S. van der Zwaag Editor, Self Healing Materials-An Alternative Approach to 20 Centuries of Materials Science. Springer, 2007.  about half of this book talk self healing polymers.

For the 2009 solicitation, we will consider proposals that aim to investigate emerging frontiers in the following two specific research areas:

1. BioSensing & BioActuation: Interface of Living and Engineered Systems (BSBA)
2. Hydrocarbons from Biomass (HyBi)

Due dates

• Letter of Intent Deadline Date:  October 14, 2008
• Preliminary Proposal Deadline Date:  December 2, 2008
• Full Proposal Deadline Date:  April 30, 2009

Highly motivated PhD or MS/PhD candidates are sought for
research in computational mechanics and inverse problems in the Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh.

We have six strain compatibility equations, which are obtained from strain-displacement relations by making an assumptions 'small strains'. Strain compatibility equations ensure a single valued and continuous displacemnet filed. These equations are used in stress based approach.

Now my queries are as following.

[1] Do we have strain compatibility equations for non-linear strain-displacement relations?

[2] Do we follow stress based approach in non-linear solid mechanics.

For me it looks like it is difficult (may not be possible also) derive strain compatibility equations in nonlinear  solid mechanics.

Ronald Rivlin has probably made the crucial contribution to shaping the discipline of Nonlinear Continuum Mechanics which underlies the modern powerful finite element software. Rivlin was decorated with many awards including the Timoshenko medal. Unfortunately, his Timoshenko speech is not available. Fortunately, Springer published two volumes of collected works of Rivlin. I extract an account of Rivlin's results and thoughts from the book and attach it on PDF. The reading of Rivlin is both interesting and instructive.

I am a third yr undergraduate student of Aerospace Engineering department, IIT Kharagpur. I have a very simple question in strucutral mechanics. Is there any analytical solution available for deflection of plate under distributed load?

Can i have some notes on FEM & FDM?

We recently find that podosomes, very dynamic, self-organized structures, can function as mechanosensors.  For details, see the recent issue of Current Biology.

FYI. If you have any questions, please contact the organizer directly (see link below). 

http://www.mmm2008.org/bin/view.pl/Main/WebHome

The Fourth International Conference on Multiscale Materials Modeling
October 27-31, 2008, Tallahassee, FL, USA

Symposium 1: Mathematical issues in multiscale materials modeling

Symposium 2: Statistical methods for materials deformation and failure

Symposium 3: Multiscale mechanics

A postdoctoral position at Sandia National Labs in Livermore, CA is available for an applied mechanics engineer with a strong background in computational constitutive model development. The work will support our current projects in the areas of continuum plasticity and failure modeling. The applicant will also be expected to implement models into Sandia computer codes for high-performance computing simulations. In addition, the candidate will collaborate with structural analysts to apply these advanced models to Sandia applications.

Metallic glass in bulk form is known to have superb strength and elastic response but very limited plastic deformation ability. Through machining the metaillinc glass into submicometer pillars, experiment found that metallic glass can actually sustain very large plastic doformation (see attached Figure).  The detail of this finding can be found in our most recent publication: Z. W. Shan et al, Plastic flow and failure resistance of metallic glass: Insight from in situ compression of nanopillars, Phys. Rev. B 77, 155419 (2008) (6 pages). Videos are availabe upon request.