Zhigang Suo's blog

The attached notes are written for a course on plasticity.  When I update the posts, I will write a note on my twitter account:  https://twitter.com/zhigangsuo.  

In a pure liquid, molecules touch one another but change neighbors frequently.  External forces cause the liquid to change shape by viscous flow.  Thermal agitation causes  molecules to undergo self-diffusion.  The two phenomena--viscous flow and self-diffusion--often result from a single rate-limiting process:  molecules change neighbors.  This simple picture is amply confirmed by the Stokes-Einstein relation, which links the viscosity and self-diffusivity for many liquids over wide ranges of temperature.

The attached notes are written for a course on plasticity.  I will update new posts on my twitter account:  https://twitter.com/zhigangsuo.  

The attached notes are written for a course on plasticity.  I will update new posts on my twitter account:  https://twitter.com/zhigangsuo.  Rheology is the science of deformation. This science poses a question for every material: given a history of stress, how do we find the history of strain?

I am teaching this course this semester.  I'll post notes as I write them.  Links to the notes are listed in this post.  I will also notify updates on twitter:  https://twitter.com/zhigangsuo

I wrote these notes as a background for teaching elasticity and plasticity.  Even in this most basic formulation, the dilation of the fluid is viscoelastic.

A previous post, Getting Ready for Extreme Mechanics Letters, contained the following paragraph:

“We seek papers from researchers in all disciplines. Mechanics appeals to talents of all kinds. Good mechanics has long been created by people from many fields, by Galileo, Newton, Maxwell and Faraday, as well as by Watt, Darwin, Wright brothers and Whitesides. People make discoveries in mechanics often when doing something else (e.g., in seeking evidence for the existence of God, in building cathedrals, in flying airplanes, in laying transatlantic telegraph cables, in fabricating microprocessors, in watching cells move, in fracking for gas, in inventing optical tweezers, in creating soft lithography, in developing wearable or implantable electronics). Mechanics discovered in one field invariably finds applications in other fields.”

Here I would like to give several examples of papers published in recent decade or so. I will link each paper to its citations on Google Scholar, so that you can have an overview of the influence of the paper on other researchers.

Starting a new journal is risky.  Starting a new journal in mechanics is particularly risky.  The responses to the two recent posts are encouraging, however.

• Getting ready for Extreme Mechanics Letters

• What can iMechanica do for Extreme Mechanics Letters

Within two weeks since the first post, the combined reads of the two entries have passed 20,000.