Iain Finnie passed away in December. At the time he was the James Fife Professor Emeritus U.C. Berkeley Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.



Iain had an amazing number of contributions spanning diverse area of mechanics. To the best of my recollection:



He published some great early work on the shear angle in metal cutting in 1953.

He published the first book on creep in 1959 with William Heller.

He published a (the?) pioneering paper on erosion in 1960.

 (in Computational Methods for Microstructure-Property Relationships," Springer. Edited by Somnath Ghosh and Dennis Dimiduk)

Dislocation mediated continuum plasticity: case studies on modeling scale dependence, scale-invariance, and directionality of sharp yield-point

Claude Fressengeas, Amit Acharya, Armand Beaudoin

Closing date for receipt of applications: 30 January 2010You will join a research project “Optimise blast resistance of novel composites made with fibre metal laminates (FMLs)” sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust. The project will be jointly supervised with Prof. Cantwell who is an expert on testing of novel composites. The project is to develop comprehensive finite element models capable of simulating various deformation and failure modes relating to composite features of FMLs subjected to extreme loading conditions.

A research position at postdoctoral level is currently available in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney. The position is full-time fixed term for 2.5 years; further extension may be possible depending on the performance and availability of funding. The appointee will be working in a project funded by the Australian Research Council on the study of quasi-brittle fracture. Briefly, the project aims at understanding fracture and fragmentation processes in quasi-brittle materials, which is critical to the prediction of natural catastrophes and structural failures.

It is well known thatdislocations in FCC metals are composed of partial dislocations separated bystacking faults.  When consideringthe reactions of dislocations with each other, such as in DD simulations, it is necessary to determine therelative positions of the partials in order to correctly describe theconfigurations that are created in the reactions.  Here we describe a geometric method for correctly determiningthe relative positions of the partials. The results we obtain can also be found by applying an axiom, or rule,given in the book by Hirth and Lothe. At the end

The Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is actively seeking candidates for faculty positions in all areas of mechanical science and engineering.  Please see the official announcement below.

Faculty Positions in Mechanical Science and Engineering

I am working on a project "vehicle ride dynamics using component mode synthesis." I would be making a matlab code to determine the vehicle body response due to road excitation signals. I will be modelling the tyre stiffnesses using springs, suspension with springs and dampers and vehicle body using plate of varying stiffnesses. I want to know that how a vehicle body can be approximately modelled with a plate of varying stiffnesses so that it reflects the real car body, as just assuming it as plate( of constant stiffness) will be too crude approximation. Also i woluld like to compare various CMS methods like free interface, fixed interface, hybrid interface on this system. If anybody has done any work in this field please provide some guidance. 

Due to the migration of mobile molecules and ions, a thin diffusive layer of distributed charge - the electric double layer - forms at the interface between a polyelectrolyte gel and a liquid ionic solution.  When two polyelectrolyte gels are brought closely together, the electric double layers overlap and interact with each other, resulting in an effective repulsion.  The multiphysics coupling nature of soft gels makes their surface interactions significantly different from the interactions between rigid solids.

The electric-field-induced phase transition was investigated under mechanical confinements in bulk samples of an antiferroelectric perovskite oxide at room temperature. Profound impacts of mechanical confinements on the phase transition are observed due to the interplay of ferroelasticity and the volume expansion at the transition. The uniaxial compressive prestress delays while the radial compressive prestress suppresses it. The difference is rationalized with a phenomenological model of the phase transition accounting for the mechanical confinement.