Prior Courses in Solid Mechanics:

Elasticity, Strength of Material, Plasticity, Theoretical Mechanics, Advanced Solid Mechanics, Computational Mechanics

Undergraduate Major:

Theoretical and Applied Mechanics

Strength Related to This Course:

I have already known some basic theories in elasticity and plasticity, so I guess it might be a little easier for me to understand the theoretical part taught in this course.

Weakness Related to This Course:

My previous exposure to solid mechanics is tangential beyond a first semester course in beam bending, beam stretching, and beam torsion. I am a master of Mohr's circle, and am looking to extend my practice in solid mechanics to include interesting problems and applications of the theory of solids.

I studied Engineering Mechanics as an undergraduate, and received a second degree in Mathematics, with a concentration in Applied Math.

My strengths include exposure to much of the math in traditional solid and continuum mechanics, and an imagination. My weaknesses in solid mechanics are manifold, but I'll limit my list to limited exposure to solid mechanics theory, and impatience for solving problems numerically.

Hi All,

--I have taken 3 previous courses in solid mechanics. 

--My undergraduate major was mechanical engineering, with a concentration in vehicle dynamics.

-- My strength is that I've had some of this material before.  My weakness is that I haven't seen it for a few years.

--I'm a masters student so I don't have a research group.  I do work part time for a hedge fund though.

--Solid mechanics will add an interesting dimension to my education. 

-Tom 

I have not taken any courses focusing on mechanics before, though ES51 (Computer Aided Machine Design) briefly touched on some topics.  My undergraduate major was Physics.  My strengths will be my comfort with mathematics as well as my exposure to professor Howard Stone's undergraduate class in Fluid Mechanics (ES123).  My weakness will definitely be my lack of exposure to any other mechanics courses.

My name is Matt Pharr, and I am a first year graduate student at Harvard in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.  I am working with Dr. Zhigang Suo's research group http://www.seas.harvard.edu/suo/ .  My concentration is in solid mechanics, so ES 240 is obviously fundamentally important to my future research.  One of my main goals in this class is to build a solid foundation in solid mechanics.  More specifically, I want to be able to better analyze problems and understand equations in terms of their physical meaning.

Hello,

My name is Pawel and I am a Junior in Harvard College, studying Mechanical and Materials Science and Engineering.

The only course in solid mechanics I've taken so far is the Harvard's undergraduate intro course ES 120 - I guess it's similar to intro courses offered at other universities. Bits and pieces of solid mechanics also appeared in some other courses, but mostly in a very basic form.

One of my strengths (although not a very important one) might be the fact that I took the intro course relatively recently, and still remember some of it. In this category I could also add interest in solid mechanics in general.

Hi everyone, very glad to see you here. My name is Kejie Zhao, a first year phd student working in Prof.Zhigang Suo's group (www.seas.harvard.edu/suo). My concentration is solid mechanics with the same name of this course, it also signifies its importance to my future research. I graduate from Xi'an Jiaotong University in China before coming to Harvard. There I obtained my bachelor and master degree in Engineering Mechanics and Solid Mechanics respectively. I have taken several courses related to ES240 at undergraduate level, i.e., elasticity mechanics, plasticity, non-linear continuum mechanics etc.

Hello.

My name is Sung Hoon Kang and I am a second year graduate student of Applied Physics. I did my undergraduate study in Materials Sciene and Engineering at Seoul National University, Korea.

I work with Prof. Joanna Aizenberg (http://www.seas.harvard.edu/aizenberg_lab/) and my research is to study responsive polymer materials/structures. I take ES 240 to have insights for better understanding and possibly modeling movements of high aspect ratio pillars by various stimuli and I think taking ES 240 can give me a broader perspective of understanding behavior of materials because I used to work on only electrical and optical properties of materials.

Professor Ed Berger, Univeristy of Virginia Mechanical Engineering, is featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education for his use of web technologies and, in particular, "video solutions" for teaching undergraduate mechanics courses. See http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i34/era01301.htm.  Or contact Berger at berger@virginia.edu.  Ed hasn't used this approach for all undergraduate mechanics courses as yet, but the potential is there. 

PhD Position: Solid Mechanics/Biomechanics at KTH-Stockholm

A four to five-year PhD position focusing on the analysis of multi-scale phenomena in diseased blood vessels including atherosclerotic plaques has recently been opened at KTH Solid Mechanics. The position is fully supported by the Swedish Research Council.

I am delighted to announce on behalf of Elsevier that Professor Michael Ortiz of CalTech has won the very first Rodney Hill Prize in Solid mechanics in reconition of his body of research during the decade 1998-2007. The prize will be presented at ICTAM in Adelaide on 27 August by Y.S. Chi, Vice Chairman of Elsevier immediately prior to Michael's Hill Prize lecture. For more details please see http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/P10.cws_home/hillprizewinner

Dean Eastbury

Publisher

Elsevier, UK  

I am pleased to announce that Volume 1, Number 2 of the the recently-launched Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials (www.elsevier.com/locate/jmbbm) has been published by Elsevier. All JMBBM articles can be accessed free-of-charge on ScienceDirect until September 2008 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/17516161).

FACULTY POSITION
 
 
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA
 
 

Here is a Lectureship in Solid Mechanics available in the Engineering Science Department at Oxford posted by Prof.Alan Cocks.

We currently have a University Lectureship in Solid Mechanics available in the Engineering Science Department at Oxford.  I have attached a copy of the advert and further particulars. I would be grateful if you could pass this information on to anybody who you think would be interested in this post.  We would welcome applications from candidates with significant potential for research in solid mechanics and are particularly interested in strengthening our activity in the area of high strain rate mechanics.

Attached please find my final project.

Here is the powerpoint of the final project, presented by Stevie Steiner and myself.

Attached is a PDF version of the PowerPoint presentation from our final project, titled "Viscous Deformation of a Quartz Tube Caused by Furnace Malfunction:  Analysis and Modeling".

See Attached

We find a way of constructing special inclusions by solving variational inequalities. As a side result, the Eshelby conjectures, which asserts that uniform eigenstress induces uniform elastic strain if and only if the inclusion is an ellipsoid, are solved. In a periodic setting, we can construct optimal ordered structures in the sense of attaining the Hashin-Shtrikman bounds. These works have been submitted and preprints are available at http://www.its.caltech.edu/~liulp/. Examples of multiply-connected inclusion with Eshelby uniformity property are shown below, see the papers for more examples and description of numerical schemes.

Professor Y. C. Fung, Professor Emeritus of Bioengineering at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering, is the recipient of the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize of 2007.

The Russ Prize is presented biannually to an outstanding candidate in the field of bioengineering who has made significant contributions to improving the human condition through research, development, teaching, or management. The recipient receives a $500,000 cash award and an engraved gold medallion.

This is the last problem set this semester. It is due on Friday, Dec. 14, 2007.

See attachment for ES 240 lecture notes on plasticity.

Lei and I will be working on developing the appropriate relations and numerical methods for topological optimization of  2D ideal structures.  In this constraint-based optimization study we will try to determine the density distribution which minimizes the strain energy for a fixed volume of material.  This problem is a subset of the so-called "G-closure" problem in topological optimization where we have restricted our possible configurations to certain ideal geometries.   

Andrew and I decided to work on some design topics.

Given a reference domain, some boundary conditions and a limited amount of material, which can not fill the whole domain, we want to determine the material distribution inside the domain so that the structure generated will contain the minimum elastic energy. This is called minimum compliance problem, a topic in the field of topology optimization.

Our initial goal is to implement the numerical methods in this field to the interesting examples offered in our class, such as the wall cylinder and the plate under distributed pressure, and then analyse the computational results. If time permits, we will consider other optimization objects beside the elastic energy.