Problem Set #1 - background

Hi, I am Roberto Soares and I am a PhD student in Engineering Mechanics at UNL. My undergrad is from Brazil in Civil Engineering (Federal University of Ceara) and my Master’s in Engineering Mechanics from UNL. In the past I had the chance to take Continuum Mechanics, Adv Mechanics of Materials, FEM and several courses in Materials.

I am currently working with Multiscale Modeling of the Evolution of Damage in Heterogeneous Viscoelastic Solids, in other words, I am trying to predict life of asphalt concrete roadways. Since this is a computational mechanics research I guess one of my weaknesses is not spend a lot of time in the lab, making sometimes more difficult relate theory to practice. However, being in that area gave me a good background in programming. Our research group doesn’t have a website yet, it’s under construction, however for publications of the group, one can check http://drdavidhallen.unl.edu/.

My interest in fracture mechanics exist since I started with my graduate programs. I realized that to model any object accurately I would have to include any form of energy dissipation, and one of them is in the form of cracks. So, by understanding how things break I can make better life predictions and consequently do better research.