Springer launched new journal: Mechanics of Soft Materials
This journal offers a unique forum for research on mechanical behavior of soft materials including but not limited to polymers, elastomers, gels, rubberlike materials, soft biological materials and tissues.
The journal aims at uniting considerations of various soft materials, which exhibit similarity in many aspects of their behavior independently of the specific composition or biological function.
Dear Colleagues, 13th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM) will be held in New York, July 22 - 27, 2018.
There are two polar contemporary approaches to the constitutive modeling of arterial wall with anisotropy induced by collagen fibers. The first one is based on the angular integration (AI) of the strain energy on a unit sphere for the analytically defined fiber dispersion. The second one is based on the introduction of the generalized structure tensors (GST). AI approach is very involved computationally while GST approach requires somewhat complicated procedure for the exclusion of compressed fibers.
A new postdoctoral fellow position will start on 1 November 2017 at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The position is in the area of theoretical and computational modeling of failure in soft solids. The potential candidate should have a Ph.D.
Microscopic voids can irreversibly grow into the macroscopic ones under hydrostatic tension. To explain this phenomenon it was suggested in the literature to use the asymptotic value of the hydrostatic tension in the plateau yield-like region on the stress-stretch curve obtained for the neo-Hookean model. Such an explanation has two limitations: (a) it relies on analysis of only one material model and (b) the hyperelasticity theory is used for the explanation of the failure phenomenon.
Remarkable mechanical properties of biocomposites (bone, teeth, shell, antler etc.) are usually attributed to their special design where staggered mineral platelets are embedded in a protein matrix. Because of the high aspect ratio of the platelet the soft protein deforms in the shear mode predominantly providing the linkage for the hard inclusions. Mimicking Nature one might design materials with a similar architecture.
Cracks are created by massive breakage of molecular or atomic bonds. The latter, in its turn, leads to the highly localized loss of material, which is the reason why even closed cracks are visible by a naked eye. Thus, fracture can be interpreted as the local material sink. Mass conservation is violated locally in the area of material failure. We consider a theoretical formulation of the coupled mass and momenta balance equations for a description of fracture.
This book is an outgrowth of lecture notes of a graduate course on mechanics of soft materials that I teach since 2009. The interest in mechanics of soft materials is triggered by the development of new engineering and biomedical technologies. Mechanical behavior of soft materials is strongly nonlinear from both physical (constitutive equations) and geometrical (large deformations) standpoints and the standard texts on mechanics of materials are not enough in this case. The nonlinearities make the subject challenging yet rich and exciting.
Aneurysms are local dilations of the arterial wall that are prone to rupture with high mortality risks. The biochemical mechanism of the aneurysm development is not clear. The mechanical mechanism of the aneurysm rupture is not clear either. I attach three papers that study two possible mechanisms of the aneurysm rupture.
