All materials are anisotropic, that's a fact. Like the fact that all materials have a nonlinear response. This we can't deny. Still enormous progress has been made by assuming both isotropy and linear elasticity. The success, as we all know, is due to the fact that many construction materials are very close to being both isotropic and linear. By definition materials may be claimed to be isotropic and linear, provided that the deviations are held within specified limits. Very often or almost always in structural design nearly perfect linearity is expected.

EML Webinar on 19 August 2020 will be given by Professor Markus Buehler, MIT via Zoom meeting. Discussion leader: Professor Grace Gu, UC Berkeley

Title: The mechanics of biomateriomics

Time: 7 am California, 10 am Boston, 3 pm London, 10 pm Beijing on 19 August 2020

Zoom Link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/271079684 

Dear colleagues, I hope this note finds you well despite the significant challenges that 2020 has brought. I am seeking to hire two post-docs for a new multidisciplinary project in my group titled "Distributed intelligence in kirigami-inspired flexible architectures". In this project we aim to implement ideas such as logic, information processing, and autonomy in materials.

The COVID-19 pandemic created huge demand of relevant medical  and personal protective equipment (PPE) and put unprecedented pressure on the healthcare system within a very short span of time. Moreover, the supply chains system faced extreme disruptions as a result of the frequent and severe lockdowns across the globe. In this situation, additive manufacturing (AM) becomes a supplementary  manufacturing process to meet the explosive demands and ease the health disaster worldwide.

We propose a new layered configuration of isotropic tubes that twists upon inflation, based on the concept of geometric incompatibilities. For more details click "Read more" below. The full paper can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4047980.

Hello Dear All,

    Thanks to Extreme Mechanics Letter, a new discusion of localized plastic deformation was published there. Three outlines of our work are:

      1. A new dislocation based consitutive model is built. It has a concise mathematical struture.

      2. Heat generated by plastic energy can be calculated by a mechanical version of Joule's law.

      3. Shear band and neck locations can be predicted by the mathematical model.

We calculate bending moduli along the principal directions for forty-four select atomic monolayers using ab initio density functional theory (DFT). Specifically, considering representative materials from each of Groups IV, III–V, V monolayers, Group IV monochalcogenides, transition metal trichalcogenides, transition metal dichalcogenides and Group III monochalcogenides, we utilize the recently developed Cyclic DFT method to calculate the bending moduli in the practically relevant but previously intractable low-curvature limit.

Structural orientation and anisotropy in biological materials: Functional designs and mechanics, Liu, Zhang, Ritchie, Advanced Functional Materials, 2020

Novelty/impact/significance:

Based on the fast expanding knowledge of biological materials, this review presents a new perspective looking into the design of nature: structural orientation (predetermined) and reorientation (in-situ change with loading) for diverse favorable mechanical functions.

In the past two decades, acoustic metamaterials have garnered much attention owing to their unique functional characteristics, which are difficult to find in naturally available materials. The acoustic metamaterials have demonstrated excellent acoustical characteristics that paved a new pathway for researchers to develop effective solutions for a wide variety of multifunctional applications, such as low-frequency sound attenuation, sound wave manipulation, energy harvesting, acoustic focusing, acoustic cloaking, biomedical acoustics, and topological acoustics.

EML Webinar on 12 August 2020 will be given by Professor Ellen Kuhl, Standard University via Zoom meeting. Discussion leader: Professor Pradeep Sharma, University of Houston.

Title: Data-driven modeling of COVID-19—Lessons learned

Time: 7 am California, 10 am Boston, 3 pm London, 10 pm Beijing on 12 August 2020