Here is our review article on fatigue of hydrogels. This is the first review of the subject. We review fatigue as any failure of material under prolonged static or cyclic loads. The paper starts with fundamentals, and covers a broad field, yet leaving a lot of interesting questions to be answered. The paper links the chemistry and mechanics of hydrogels.
The publisher now provides 50 days’ free access to the paper.
Adhesion and friction involving fluids or viscous matter, such as encountered in adhesives or in lubrication, are processes that determine everyday life, from human interaction with the environment to the function and reliability of machinery.
A postdoc or a PhD position are available immediately at the Laboratoire de Mecanique des Solides (Solid Mechanics) at https://www.polytechnique.edu/. The project is focused on understanding the impact of UV polymerization on the constitutive behaviour of printed polymer composites. The position is part of an ongoing collaboration with a german academic partner. The offers are detailed both in english and french on the job site of the CNRS (www.cnrs.fr):
In this paper, we introduce a new simple yet effective strategy to form "hydrogel skins" on polymer-based medical devices with arbitrary shapes. Hydrogel skins can convert any surface of polymer devices into robust, wet, soft, slippery, antifouling, and ionically conductive without affecting the original properties and geometries.
Abstract
The Department of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University has two on-going faculty searches.
In one search, we seek candidates to teach interdisciplinary classes related to mechanical engineering design, product design, and the design processes itself, with applications across all mechanical engineering disciplines including robotics, mechatronics, mechanical systems, thermal systems and energy systems.
In the second search, we seek candidates for an Open Topic and Open Rank search.
In this project, you will develop and apply numerical methods to gain insights into the mechanics of triboelectric nanogenerators and metamaterials. For both systems, the mechanical response is essential for the system’s function. In triboelectric generators, rough or patterned surfaces make contact and the mechanics of the interface determines contact area and stiffness and hence the charging efficiency. For metamaterials, the structural design of the individual unit cell determines the constitutive macroscopic response that can be designed in silico.
Soft wall-climbing robots
Guoying Gu, Jiang Zou, Ruike Zhao, Xuanhe Zhao and Xiangyang Zhu
Science Robotics, 2018, Vol. 3, Issue 25, eaat2874
Electromaterials Laboratory@SYSU, is an integrated environment for high-performance conductive materials (with the strong desire to combine fundamental materials science and application-directed research in a single working environment), located at Sun Yat-Sen University (SYSU) in Guangzhou, China and forms part of the Materials Science and Engineering department. Our general research activities include
• understanding and designing conductive materials in the form of films, fibers, and aerogels with unprecedented properties and performance
A fully PhD studentship in Computational Biomechanics is available at the Zienkiewicz Center for Computational Engineering (ZC2E), Swansea University, United Kingdom.
Project title: Multiscale meshfree modelling of the biorheological behaviour of healthy and diseased red blood cells
Closing date: 31 January 2019.
Proposed start date: April 2019.
Project supervisors: Dr Adesola S Ademiloye and Professor Perumal Nithiarasu
