Buckling of thin layers or aligned arrays of stiff materials on elastomeric substrates has many important applications, such as stretchable electronics, precision metrology and flexible optoelectronics.  These systems show one common phenomenon, the stiff thin layers buckle normal to the substrate surface (out-of-surface buckling).  By contrast, we recently reported for the first time that silicon nanowires (SiNWs) on elastomeric substrates buckle only within the substrate surface, i.e. in-surface buckling.  Experimental process to obtain buckled SiNWs is described.

The Eighteenth Annual International Conference on
COMPOSITES/NANO ENGINEERING (ICCE - 18)
ICCE-18 Anchorage, Alaska,USA, July 4-10, 2010
http://myweb.polyu.edu.hk/~mmktlau/ICCE/ICCE_Main.htm

Message from ICCE Chairman

(i) 3rd International Congress on Computational Mechanics and Simulation (ICCMS09) to be held this year at IIT Bombay, on December 1--5, 2009. Abstracts due by July 31, 2009:

http://www.civil.iitb.ac.in/help/114_iccms09/iccms09.html

(ii) 54th Congress of the Indian Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (An International Meet), to be held this year at the Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi, during December 18--21, 2009. Abstracts due by September 30, 2009:

http://www.webmath.iitkgp.ernet.in/~istam/

http://www.nsit.ac.in

Lecturers - University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute

The University of Michigan (UM) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) have established a Joint Institute (JI) in Shanghai with a commitment to build a world-class academic institution with educational and research missions. The UM-SJTU Joint Institute invites applications for lecturers in several disciplines. With its unique academic mission in China, the JI offers an extraordinary academic environment. The JI has been given a high degree of autonomy to model itself on world-class US universities. The students are among China’s best.

Message from ICCE Chairman

Here's a quick one.

Refer to the accompanying figure.

I have an opening for a post-doctoral position starting early next year (Jan 2009) in the broad area of multi-scale mechanics of nano-crystalline (nc) materials. The focus will be on microstructure mediated failure processes in nc materials primarily using continuum mechanics based approaches, but informed by materials science.

If you are interested, please send me (shailendra[at]nus[dot]edu[dot]sg) your CV and the names of at least two references.

Thanks,

~Shailendra

I am a third year undergraduate student of IIT Kharagpur (www.iitkgp.ernet.in). In the coming summer, we are supposed to do summer training in some industry in, or out of India, whereas if we want to do internship in a university it must be a foreign university (internship in Indian universities is not allowed).

As I am very much interested to utilize the summer time (two and half months) in doing some good research work on structural/solid mechanics, I don't think industry will be a good option. On the other hand I will not be able to do internship in foreign universities without stipend. So I am looking for a paid/partially paid internship (preferably in US/ Europe) for my next summer.

Recent events about the financial crisis and generally spread turmoils on Economics and Financial Environments  lead me to these conclusions.

Critical Speed:  informations, a key issue on finance, reached a critical speed. Maybe this is the "first" critical speed of the system. Speed of informations has reached the same order of magnitude of people's judgement (executives and investors more than others) so there's a sort of over-reaction about actual events.

Applications are invited for postdoctoral positions within the Micro and Nano Mechanics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University.  The successful candidate will participate in a vibrant interdisciplinary research group and be involved in projects addressing experiments and modeling in electro-thermo-mechanical characterization of 1-D nanostructures, probe-based techniques for direct-write fabrication of biological substrates and NEMS, and carbon nanotube-based NEMS.  Broad collaborations are facilitated through participation in the Northwestern Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, the Medical School, and Argonne and Sandia National Laboratories.

ASCE, ASME and SES will hold their Joint Conference on Mechanics and Materials on June 24-27, 2009 in Blacksburg, VA.  The conference will be chaired by Dr. Ishwar K. Puri, Department Head, Engineering Science and Mechanics, Virginia Tech. The conference web site provides details, including an invitation to submit symposium and organized session proposals, key dates, instructions for the submission of abstracts and registration information.

Applications are invited for postdoctoral positions within the Micro and Nano Mechanics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University.  The successful candidate will participate in a vibrant interdisciplinary research group and be involved in projects addressing electro-thermo-mechanical characterization of 1-D nanostructures, and probe-based techniques for direct-write fabrication of biological substrates and NEMS.  Broad collaborations are facilitated through participation in the Northwestern Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, the Medical School, and Argonne and Sandia National Laboratories.

Hi, I am a master student in Stuttgart University of Germany
I study Computational Mechanics of Materials and Structures

http://www.msc.commas.uni-stuttgart.de/index.html  

could you please give me a reference about multiscale fluid mechanics?

A Post-Doc Position is avalaible in Bio-Mimetic Adhesive Interfaces (EbioAdI) at the University of Mons-Hanaut, Belgium

One of the things that I've thought about often in relation to mechanics is:

 1)  There's a paucity of heroes. Growing up, my heroes were not mechanicians. Certainly not any of the mechanicians in the last 100-150 years. Physics has it's heroes: Feynman, Hawking, Einstein, Wheeler, Bardeen, Oppenheimer etc. etc.

We are currently offerring an introductory course on mechanics for junior students for all fields and subjects.  It is a so called general knowledge course for students to know more on certain subjects and fields before a decision on choice of a major is made.  Since the Mechanics Department in our University has not been popular for so long, we have decided to evangalize our field with more glorious history of Mechanics: Newton, Bernoulli, Euler, Clausius, Faraday, and Einstein.

Proteins are the key building blocks of all biological matter. While engineers predominantly use concrete, metals, ceramics and synthetic polymers as structural materials for their high strength and durability, Nature exploits complex mechanical and chemical features of proteins for building strong, elastic and robust materials and structures. For example, spider silk, amyloid (sturdy protein fibrils found in many diseases) and muscle fibers are made entirely of proteins and blend extensibility with high strength to achive extreme toughness. These super-fibers represent an alternative scheme of material design to biomineralization, which allows for incorporation of minerals in protein scaffolds to build very stiff and tough materials such as nacre, mollusk shells and bone. Many scientists have been intrigued by Nature's unknown recipe for creating soft yet durable and strong materials. These materials are different from their synthetic equivalents because they employ hydrogen bonds that are much weaker than covalent or metallic bonds, and exhibit entropic elasticity at the nano-scale.

Dear colleagues,

Elsevier is offering a 10% discount off the full registration fee for the 2nd International Conference on the Mechanics of Biomaterials & Tissues (www.icmobt.elsevier.com). This offer will end on 26 October 2007.

I hope you are able to come to Kaua'i and take part in this exciting and well-received conference.

Dean Eastbury

Publisher, Elsevier 

Invitation to join the Google group  Mechanics: Modeling, Experimentation and Computation

I am happy to recommend the following book for your general reading.

Ranganath, G.S., ``Mysterious Motions and other Intriguing Phenomena in Physics," Hyderabad, India: Universities Press (2001)

My googling today brought me to this treasure trove of write-ups in mechanics:

This site contains informal (usually rough draft) technical notes and tutorials on topics in mechanics. The sophistication is at the first or second year graduate level. These write-ups include:

• TUTORIALS: straightforward primers on particular topics.
• MYTH BUSTERS: Misconceptions in mechanics
• DUSTY CORNERS: little-known or interesting aspects of mechanics issues.
• BACK DOORS: "Better ways" to do common tasks.

The write-ups are limited to topics that are too well-known to be published (in journals) but not known enough to be easily found in the literature.