Biswajit Banerjee's blog

In 2010,  Yves-Patrick Pellegrini published a paper in Physical Review B called

 Dynamic Peierls-Nabarro equations for elastically isotropic crystals.  with the abstract

Every year I try to get funding for things that I'm personally interested in but which may not have any immediate economic benefits.  A couple of years ago, after reading Penrose's "Road to Reality", I thought about applying Clifford algebra ideas to fracture mechanics and wrote up a proposal to that effect.  The proposal wasn't funded, but I think the idea is worth exploring.

The summary of the proposal was

Naturally negative bulk modulus material.

Negative Linear Compressibility and Massive Anisotropic Thermal Expansion in Methanol Monohydrate

My book on metamaterials, "An introduction to metamaterials and waves in composites" has been published on June 16, 2011 by CRC Press (Taylor and Francis).

The book is meant for students, researchers, engineers, and educators who want to get a basic grounding on the theory that is the basis of recent excitement about negative materials, cloaking, transformation optics/acoustics and other wave phenomena in composites.

The word "failure" can mean different things to different people.  Over the past couple of years, my interactions with various groups from industry has shown me that for some people failure means catastropic fracture/buckling while for others it can mean highly localized plastic yielding.  Even for relatively simple sandwich composite structures, there is no clearly agreed upon definition of the word.

Yesterday, as I was waiting for the rain to stop before I could walk home from work, a stranger accosted me in the lobby of the building.  He asked me what I did, to which I replied "Mechanics".  He mulled over the answer for a bit and asked me to be more specific, at which point I said that we were trying to design materials that could guide waves around objects.  He said "Water waves?".  I replied "All types of waves."  Clearly, common words can mean quite different things to different people.

There are a couple of funded PhD positions available at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

The topics are, roughly, 

1) Advanced material models and variability

2) Biomimetic sensing and adhesion.

The deadline for applications is Friday, October 29, 2010.  Please send a current CV, a statement of purpose, and transcripts/grades from your undergraduate work (and master's work if you have a master's degree in a related field).

I was hoping to see Abaqus or Ansys as the top words. Instead I see help, thanks, stress and incident.

Worth reading

 http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/continuity.html

in case you need to explain the epsilon-delta  definition of continuity to an engineering student.

-- Biswajit