On 6 June 2007, about 50 mechanicians attended a special session at the McMat 2007, "iMechanica.org get together". The attendees of this special session came from various job sectors, such as academia, industry as well as government agencies. The session was chaired by K. Ravi-Chander and Rui Huang, who also served in the organizing committee of McMat 2007.

The 2007 Maurice A. Biot Medal for Poromechanics has been awarded during the ASCE Engineering Mechanics Conference held at Virginia Tech last Tuesday.



The 2007 Biot Medal winner is Dr. James R. Rice of Harvard University.



If you are interested in further information, such as citation of Dr. Rice's work, and photos, you can check this page:

http://www.olemiss.edu/sciencenet/poronet/medal.html

I have attached a copy of my McMat07 talk below.  The talk is about a modified mechanical threshold stress (Follansbee-Kocks) model that can be used for strain rates > 1000 /s and high homologous temperatures.  In the model, the pressure dependence of the flow stress arises from the pressure dependence of the shear modulus.  Even after using the most accurate models for the shear modulus (and the melting temperature) we find that the pressure sensitivity of the flow stress is underestimated by our model (by quite a bit).

Here is an e-book on Engineering Fracture Mechanics ; you can also download a demo version, the preface, and other related stuff from the page. The idea of the book (as described in the page) sounds interesting:

At a meeting of the Editorial Board of IJSS, on Sunday, 3 June 2007, in Austin, Texas, the representatives from Elsevier, the publisher of IJSS, told the members of the Board that all articles published in IJSS will be freely accessible 24 months after publication.  The first of these articles will become available in October 2007.  That is, all IJSS articles published after October 2005 will become freely accessible after a delay of 24 months.

If you had to design a course of the title: "Comparative Computational Mechanics" or "Comparative Methods of Computational Engineering Science and/or Mechanics", what would its contents be like?

Dr. Stewart Silling has provided me with a copy of his talk on Peridynamic theory that he presented at McMat 2007.  The PDF file of the talk is attached below.

In order to deal with classical material models and volume constraints, Dr. Silling has modified the original theory to allow for forces that are not necessarily pairwise. A bit on that is included in the talk.