The whole class will meet on 15 May 2007, Tuesday.

• 9:30am - 1:00pm, Maxwell Dworkin Room 135
• 1:00pm - 4:00pm, 60 Oxford Room 311
• Pizza will be served for lunch

The final exam will take the form of a group discussion. We have 5 students taking the class for credit. We also have 5 topics:

• Free energy and generalized coordinate. Equilibrium and stability
• Control parameter
• Configurational transitions of two types
• Critical point of configurational transition of the second type. Bifurcation analysis
  
  

• What types of PDEs can be solved using complex variable methods
• Anti-plane shear
• Elements of a function of a complex variable (contour integral, analytic continuation, conformal mapping)
  
  

To the students of ES 241:

Although finite deformation was introduced in ES 240 (Solid Mechanics), finite deformation is a building block of ES 241. To review the subject, please go over a set of problems compiled by Jim Rice. If you need a reference, see my outline of finite deformation, where you can also find a short list of textbooks.

A sponge is an elastic solid with connected pores. When immersed in water, the sponge absorbs water. When a saturated sponge is squeezed, water will come out. More generally, the subject is known as diffusion in elastic solids, or elasticity of fluid-infiltrated porous solids, or poroelasticity. The theory has been applied to diverse phenomena. Here are a few examples.

• A homogeneous field in a parallel-plate capacitor
• Particles and places
• A field of stress
• A field of electric displacement
• Helmholtz function
• Invariance
  
  

• Electric charge
• Movements of charged particles
• Elastic dielectric
• Work done by a battery and by a weight
• Electromechanical coupling
• Conservative system
• Experimental determination of electric potential
• Lagendre transformation
  
  

• A system that can exchange particles with the rest of the world
• Chemical potential
• Ideal gas
• Experimental determination of chemical potential
• Lagendre transformation
• Ideal gas once more
• Ideal solution
• Hydrogel (or poroelasticity or elastic solution)
• A system in contact with a reservoir of energy, volume and particles

Return to the outline of Statistical Mechanics

• Work done by a pressure applied to a system
• Enthalpy
• A system that changes both energy and volume
• Ideal gas
• Osmosis
• The internal energy U(S,V)
• 
  

Spring 2007, Tuesday and Thursday 10:00 am - 11:30 am. First meeting of the class: 1 February 2007.
Place: Maxwell Dworkin Room G-135

• Instructor: Zhigang Suo, 617-495-3789, suo@deas.harvard.edu, Pierce Hall 309. Skype: zhigangsuo
• Office hour: Monday 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm.
• No textbook is required. The McKay Library keeps some textbooks reserved.

Tentative topics

• A small system in thermal contact with a large system
• The Boltzmann factor
• Partition function
• The probability for a system in thermal equilibrium with a reservoir to be in a specific state
• The probability for a system in thermal equilibrium with a reservoir to be in a configuration
• Thermal fluctuation of an RNA molecule
• A matter of words
  

Return to the outline of Statistical Mechanics.

• Thermal contact
• Weakly interacting systems
• Hotness and temperature are synonymous
• Relative temperature scales
• Classify the configurations of a composite by the partition of energy
• Thermal contact of two large systems
• The absolute temperature
• Experimental determination of the absolute temperature
• The units of temperature
• Experimental determination of heat
• Experimental determination of the number of quantum states
• The entropy of an isolated system
• The entropy of a substance

Return to the outline of Statistical Mechanics

• An isolated system
• States of an isolated system
• An isolated system in equilibrium
• The fundamental postulate
• Configurations of an isolated system
• Irreversibility
• Ink particles
• Dissect the set of states of an isolated system into a family of configurations by using a variable