A short course on the “Mechanics of Liquid and Solid Foams” will be offered at CISM, the International Centre for Mechanical Sciences in Udine, Italy, 13-17 July 2015 (see brochure attached).

The course will focus on relationships between the cellular microstructure and nonlinear mechanical behavior of liquid and solid foams, and foam-like biological and synthetic materials. Theoretical models, experimental methods, and numerical simulations will be presented. The course is aimed at PhD students, postdocs, and researchers in academia and industry.

Abstract: There has been relatively little study on time-dependent mechanical properties of nanowires, in spite of their importance for the design, fabrication and operation of nanoscale devices.

http://news.sciencemag.org/education/2015/01/outlier-outlaw-outcast-imp…

A continuum constraint-free phase field model is proposed to simulate the magnetic domain evolution in ferromagnetic materials. The model takes the polar and azimuthal angles (ϑ1, ϑ2), instead of the magnetization unit vector m(m1,m2,m3), as the order parameters. In this way, the constraint on the magnetization magnitude can be exactly satisfied automatically, and no special numerical treatment on the phase field evolution is needed.

Processing technologies are rapidly advancing and manufacturers now have the ability to control material architecture, or topology, at unprecedented length scales. This opens up the design space and provides exciting opportunities for tailoring material properties through design of the material’s topology. But as seen many times in history with advancements in materials and processing technologies, the natural default is to rely on familiar shapes and structure topologies.

Amit Acharya         Marta Lewicka         Mohammad Reza Pakzad

In Nonlinearity, 29, 1769-1797

We study a class of design problems in solid mechanics, leading to a variation on the
classical question of equi-dimensional embeddability of Riemannian manifolds. In this general new
context, we derive a necessary and sufficient existence condition, given through a system of total
differential equations, and discuss its integrability. In the classical context, the same approach
yields conditions of immersibility of a given metric in terms of the Riemann curvature tensor.
In the present situation, the equations do not close in a straightforward manner, and successive
differentiation of the compatibility conditions leads to a more sophisticated algebraic description
of integrability. We also recast the problem in a variational setting and analyze the infimum value
of the appropriate incompatibility energy, resembling "non-Euclidean elasticity".  We then derive a
Γ-convergence result for the dimension reduction from 3d to 2d in the Kirchhoff energy scaling
regime. A practical implementation of the algebraic conditions of integrability is also discussed.

Dear Colleague Letter: Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI), Mechanics of Materials and Structures (MoMS) – Employment Opportunity for Program Director Positions (Open Until Filled)

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2015/cmmi15001/cmmi15001.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_147

Dear colleagues,

There have been two changes at NSF that do affect the imechanica community. I would like to bring these to your attention.

Dear All, Please see the attachment. We are looking only for an MSc student intern who is enrolled in a Higher Education Institution (in the European Union). The topic is the variational theory of fracture for microchip manufacturing. Connections to a relevant company in France are possible. Please see also, in the attachment, our 2014 Computational Mechanics Lab Report and our best wishes for 2015. Regards, Stéphane and the team. Best wishes for 2015: http://hdl.handle.net/10993/19425