Design of mechanical metamaterials is typically realized by repeating microstructured building blocks or unit cells. Microstructures of these unit cells can be identical, whereas individual design of each cell and various combinations of unit cells definitely offer more freedoms and possibilities for combinatorial design of metamaterials. Unfortunately, this combinatorial design problem is prohibitively challenging, if not impossible, due mainly to its huge number of combinatorial cases.

I am excited to announce our work (with Dr. Oden) on enhancing the accuracy of neural operators using the so-called corrector operator. This work is a culmination of our efforts in using goal-oriented a-posteriori error estimates in Bayesian inference in Jha and Oden (2022), JCP 470, 111575, and recently using a similar idea in Cao et al. (2023), JCP 486, 112104. 

Location: Polytechnic University of Bari, Department of Mechanics Mathematics and Management (DMMM), Via Orabona 4 - 70125 Bari – Italy

Job Type: Full Time

Deadline: 17 July 2023

Location: Polytechnic University of Bari, Department of Mechanics Mathematics and Management (DMMM), Via Orabona 4 - 70125 Bari – Italy

Job Type: Full Time

Deadline: 17 July 2023

I am looking for PhD students for my newly founded research group "Soft Robotics for Autonomous Systems" at the University of Stuttgart. The positions are fully funded and include German social security and health care benefits. More information can be found in the attached pdf.

My colleague Milan Jirásek is opening a two-year postdoctoral position in developing new regularized models for predicting and understanding failure processes under general conditions.

The inaugural Future Faculty Symposium (FFS) will be part of the 60th Society of Engineering Science Annual Conference (SES 2023) at the University of Minnesota in October, please see attached flyer. The goal is to provide a venue for senior PhDs/Postdocs to showcase their reserach and facilitate recruiting dynamics.

A methodology for deriving dual variational principles for the classical Newtonian mechanics of mass points in the presence of applied forces, interaction forces, and constraints, all with a general dependence on particle velocities and positions, is presented. Methods for incorporating constraints are critically assessed. General theory, as well as explicitly worked out variational principles for a dissipative system (Lorenz) and a system with anholonomic constraints (Pars) are demonstrated. Conditions under which a (family of) dual Hamiltonian flows, as well as constants of motion, may be associated with a dissipative, and possibly constrained, primal system are specified.

link to paper

Soft biological tissues often exhibit notable strain stiffening under increasing stretch, and this can have significant effects on tissue growth and morphological development, such as causing symmetry breaking in growing airways and leading to mucosal folding and airway hyperresponsiveness. To investigate the role of strain stiffening and the multifactorial control in growth and remodeling, we consider a growing tubular structure with strain-stiffening effects caused by increased and tightened collagen.

Dear Colleagues,

I invite you to read our recent paper on the orientation dependent plasticity mechanisms that control the dynamic creation of nanostructures and their  behavior under subsequent quasistatic microcompression published in the International Journal of Plasticity: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijplas.2023.103657