I am designing a new course on FEM, to be offered privately in India. It will emphasize fundamentals, and try to supply (or bring out) the physical interpretations behind the mathematical formalisms.

Well-known for its high yield strength, metallic glass often suffers from its low ductility and intrinsic brittleness, as discussed in a recent iMech jClub theme on plasticity and failure in metallic glasses led by Yanfei Gao.

We present a coupled mathematical model of growth and failure of the abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). The failure portion of the model is based on the constitutive theory of softening hyperelasticity where the classical hyperelastic law is enhanced with a new constant indicating the maximum energy that an infinitesimal material volume can accumulate without failure. The new constant controls material failure and it can be interpreted as the average energy of molecular bonds from the microstructural standpoint.

In MEMS fields, a need arises in engineering practice to predict accurately the nonlinear response of slender post-buckling beams, especially the nonlinear transverse stiffness. The bistability of the post-buckling beams is excellent in reducing power consumption of micro-devices or micro-systems. However, the major difficulty in analyzing the post-buckling and snap-through response is the intractability of the geometric nonlinear control equations of large deflection beams.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijfatigue.2008.03.004

The Materials Research Department at Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy, Technical University of Denmark, is seeking a PhD student within the field of advanced fibre composites. The PhD position will aim at increasing the fundamental knowledge of wood fibres and their behaviour as reinforcements in composite materials studying e.g. wood fibre structure and mechanical and hygroscopic properties e.g. by micromechanical modelling and advanced testing.

Dear colleagues,

The following is our most recent research work to share with you.  http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v7/n2/abs/nmat2085.html

As the most rigid cytoskeletal filaments, microtubules bear compressive forces in living cells, balancing the tensile forces within the cytoskeleton to maintain the cell shape. It is often observed that, in living cells, microtubules under compression severely buckle into short wavelengths. By contrast, when compressed, isolated microtubules in vitro buckle into single long-wavelength arcs. The critical buckling force of the microtubules in vitro is two orders of magnitude lower than that of the microtubules in living cells.