By Michael H . Suo and Zhigang Suo
While browsers have improved greatly in recent years, we have noticed that many academics are still missing out on important functions. In this post, we will focus on Firefox, an open-source browser that has recently gained popularity. Note: this is not a Microsoft-bashing article. Internet Explorer 7 is a very functional modern browser, but for the reasons below, we like Firefox better.
I think that the note by Zhigang Suo puts forth a pressing issue. Coming from remotely related areas in physics (quantum mechanics and electromagnetic theory), my own interests and work have recently evolved to topics in both solid mechanics (crystal surfaces) and aspects of fluid mechanics (advection-diffusion and a most recent start on biomembranes). Hence, practically, I cannot see any boundaries between these disciplines.
I believe that questions Zhigang raised today worth discussing as a topic within this forum. I will start and please comment.
The traditional roles of mechanics in the medical implant industry is to ensure safety through reliability assessment and to prove functionality through in-vitro testing.
Things are changing, in mid-90s, Charley Taylor and his colleagues pioneered "predictive medicine" and "simulation-based medical planning" in which they uses CFD to help making surgical decisions. Professor Taylor's research in "predictive medicine" and "simulation-based medical planning" has been featured on several television and radio programs including Quantum, Beyond 2000, New Media News, and The Osgood Files and has appeared in Discover, Mechanical Engineering, Technology Review and The Scientist magazines. (statement directly from his web site). Mechanics goes into the prediction of medicine performances.
iMechanica has just passed the milestone of 1000 registered users, and showed no sign of slowing down. Despite all the enthusiasms among a growing number of active users, you might have noticed that iMechanica is missing a powerful community: the community of fluid mechanicians.
The Department of Energy and Refrigerating Air-Conditioning Engineering at National Taipei University of Technology (NTUT) invites applications for one tenure-track faculty position in the area of ENERGY. Ph.D. in engineering is required. The position starts on August 1, 2007. Duties include teaching and research. The due day for application is on March 1, 2007.
For many mechanicians and materials scientists one of the most confounding things (in the ever increasing literature on carbon nanotubes) is the reported theoretical value of the nanotube elastic modulus. Depending upon the specific paper at hand, the reported numerical values range from 1 -6 TPa!
Initially posted on Applied Mechanics News on 28 April 2007.
Hot rolling from ingot is the dominant fabrication method of producing plate, sheet, and foil aluminum products. It is a striking fact that the total rolling-plant recovery of aluminum process from ingot to final products is typically about 50%. This recovery loss causes enormous amount of energy waste both as remelt energy and energy to process material that is just recycled. Assuming the annual US domestic net shipments of sheet and plate products being 10,500 million lb, 10% improvement of the hot rolling recovery will result annual savings of $126 million per year for the US domestic aluminum industry. The annual domestic energy savings would be 2.54 trillion Btu. The environmental benefits include annual reduction of 2.32 million lb SOx , 1.01 million lb NOx, 303.2 million lb CO2, 0.67 million lb of particulate, and 11000 lb VOCsd .
The fundamental inability to reduce or eliminate these recovery losses is “lack of the integrated models that relate structural properties to manufacturing processes”. Currently, processing parameters are determined by trial and error and largely based on experience. This makes it difficult to optimize the process even on the macroscale level, and almost impossible from microstructure level. Research in the following areas are desirable:
The number of registered iMechanicians has just passed 1000 today. iMechanica went "officially" online on 9 September 2006. See other numbers of iMechanica recorded today, and our evolving history.
The following are links to the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) documents:
Mitigating the threat of terrorist attacks against high occupancy buildings is a challenging task.
Chapter 1: ASSET VALUE, THREAT/HAZARD, VULNERABILITY, AND RISK
This chapter presents several methodologies for architects and engineers to quantify risk and to identify the most effective mitigation measures to achieve a desired level of protection against terrorist attacks at an acceptable cost.
C. Eberl, D. S. Gianola, R. J. Thompson (in alphabetic order)
With this contribution we would like to point to a free MATLAB tool which uses digital image correlation and tracking techniques to measure strain from a series of digital images. The code can be found on the ‘MATLAB central file exchange’ as well as the documentation, example images and some slides. We use the code on a daily basis for micro- and nanoscale measurements and present it here to be used and further developed by the community. Since it was posted at the end of september the code is now ranked place one or two in google and has been downloaded about 1000 times.
