A cantilever beam with elastic hinge pulled antagonistically by two dielectric elastomer (DE) membranes in tension forms a foldable actuator if one DE membrane is subject to a voltage and releases part of tension. Simply placing parallel rigid bars on the prestressed DE membranes results in enhanced actuators working in pure shear state. We report design, analysis, fabrication and experiment of soft mobile robots that are moved by such foldable DE actuators.

Please see the Website for more details.

Several Ph.D./M.Sc. positions available at the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada), Department of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering at the Computational Fluid & Structural Mechanics (CFSM) group of professor Artem Korobenko.

Candidates should have a good communication skills and strong background in numerical methods and programming in one of the languages (Fortran/Python/C/C++) and have solid knowledge in one of the following areas: 

The School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania is growing its faculty by 33% over a five-year period. As part of this initiative, the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics is engaged in an aggressive, multi-year hiring effort for multiple tenure-track positions at the Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor levels.

The international research training group "Integrated Engineering of continuous-discontinuous long fiber reinforced polymer structures” offers one post-doc position at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Discontinuous long fiber reinforced polymer structures with local continuous fiber reinforcements represent an important class of lightweight materials. This class of materials has a significant potential for energy savings due to the high specific stiffness and strength as well as the variety of design options in diverse technical applications, e.g., in vehicle construction.

Tuning of a piezoelectric vibration absorber attached to a damped structure

By : Payam Soltani, Gaetan Kerschen, Gilles Tondreau, Arnaud Deraemaeker

Abstract:

I am pleased to announce that Prof. Robert Shepherd from Cornell University and Prof. Kejie Zhao from Purdue University have been voted by the award committee as the recipients of the 2016 EML Young Investigator Award.

Our recent work investigates the extension of the microplane formulation to the description of transversely isotropic materials such as shale rock, foams, unidirectional composites, and ceramics. Two possible approaches are considered: 1) the spectral decomposition of the stiffness tensor to define the microplane constitutive laws in terms of energetically orthogonal eigenstrains and eigenstresses; and 2) the definition of orientation-dependent microplane elastic moduli.

We proposed a computational methodology for generating microstructure models of random composites with cylindrical or sphero-cylindrical inclusions having high volume fraction and broad aspect ratio distribution. The proposed methodology couples the random sequential adsorption (RSA) algorithm and dynamic finite element (FE) simulations. It uses RSA to generate sparse inclusion assemblies of low volume fraction and subsequently utilizes dynamic FE simulation for inclusion packing to achieve high volume fractions.

5-Year Career Development Fellowship (CDF) at Balliol College in the University of Oxford. Closes: 12th October 2016. Details below:

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AOP191/career-development-fellowship-in-engin…

A Doctorate of Engineering (DE) student position is available for Spring/Summer 2017 in Mechanical Engineering. The applicants are required to be specialized in solid mechanics and be well-familier with finite element methods. The positions involves multi-scale modeling of friction at high temperature and are directed by Multiscale Contact Mechanics and Tribology Laboratory at Lamar University, Beaumont, TX, USA.