Dear iMechanica,

Last July I posted a journal club entry on overcoming the traditional challenges in mechanically actuating liquid-crystalline elastomers (http://imechanica.org/node/16853). I'm glad to say we finally got our first manuscript regarding this work published in RSC Advances (DOI: 10.1039/C5RA01039J). 

We recently proposed a model for rate and state friction by studying the collective (statistical) behavior of viscoelastic asperities. Various observed features of friction emerge as collective phenomena, without postulating them directly at the microscale. The paper is available at the link below. 

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022509614002063

Thank you.

"Hydraulic fracture during epithelial stretching"

I hope some of you may find this work interesting:

http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat4206.html 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat4206

 We would like to invite you to participate in a symposium on “Modeling and experimental characterization for the behavior of the micro/nanostructured thin films” in ASME 2015 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition
November 13 – 19, 2015 
Houston, Texas. The deadline for abstract submission is March 2, 2015.

Organizers:

Danial Faghihi, Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences,UT Austin

Place: AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

Dates: March 2-3, 2015

One Research Fellow (Post-doc) position is open at the National University of Singapore.

If hired, you will work at Soft Materials Lab @ Advanced Robotics Centre (ARC), which I head.

Job Desription: Conduct research on biomechanics of the human motion, and how to effectively harvest energy from these motions using a soft and stretchable generator.  You are expected to perform both theoretical and experimental investigation, produce research papers and perhaps, file patents.

Job Description