Konstantin Volokh's blog

Ph.D. position at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.  The research is concerned with the modeling of failure and fracture in soft materials and biological tissues.  Preference will be given to candidates with background in nonlinear finite element methods and constitutive modeling. If you are interested, please send an email to me at: cvolokh [at] technion.ac.il (cvolokh[at]technion[dot]ac[dot]il) with a single PDF file containing

We review some recent approaches to modeling failure and fracture of soft materials. By failure we mean the onset of damage via material instability. By fracture we mean further localization of damage into cracks with their subsequent propagation.

A new postdoctoral fellow position will be open at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology - starting from July 2021.  The research is concerned with the modeling of failure and fracture in soft materials and biological tissues.  Potential candidates should have a Ph.D.

In this note, we develop simple analytical formulas to estimate the effect of residual stresses on the pulse wave velocity in blood vessels. We combine these formulas with three constitutive models of the arterial wall: the Fung model and two models accounting for the dispersion of collagen fibers via 8 and 16 structure tensors accordingly. The residual stresses come into play with a description of the initial kinematics - the opening angle.

A new postdoctoral fellow position is open at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.  The research is concerned with the modeling of failure and fracture in soft materials.  Potential candidates should have a Ph.D.

Latest articles

This is a corrected, revised and expanded edition. I added new Chapter 11 on modeling fracture in soft materials. Arguably, fracture is the central and unsolved problem in solid mechanics. I describe a new perspective on this problem based on the material sink approach, in which momenta and mass balance are coupled.

Most soft materials resist volumetric changes much more than shape distortions. This experimental observation led to the introduction of the incompressibility constraint in the constitutive description of soft materials. The incompressibility constraint provides analytical solutions for problems which, otherwise, could be solved numerically only. However, in the present work, we show that the enforcement of the incompressibility constraint in the analysis of failure of soft materials can lead to somewhat non- physical results. 

The journal has been launched online. I attach the Editorial:

The remarkable phenomenon of the drag reduction via addition of small amounts of polymer molecules to a Newtonian solvent was observed experimentally long ago. However, the theoretical explanations of this observation are not overwhelming yet. In this note, we present a possible theoretical account of the phenomenon. It is based on the use of the Navier–Stokes model with viscous strength for the solvent and the upper-convected Maxwell model for the polymer solute.