Cai Shengqiang's blog

Faculty from Caltech, UC Berkeley , University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Brown University, University of Calgary, University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Johns Hopkins University, Imperial College, London, and UCSD and researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories congregated to UCSD  on January 18-19, 2014 to attend the third in a series of symposia on Multiscale Dislocation Dynamics and to honor Professor Michael Ortiz  on his 60th birthday. Faculty also brought their graduate students and postdocs to engage in such a powerful intellectual activity.

I have a postdoc position in the dept. of MAE in UCSD, starting from Feb. 2013.

The research will be on the mechanics of soft materials and biomaterials, the design and fabrication of soft active structures and

mechanics of energy materials. 

People with experimental background on experimental mechanics, materials fabrication and bioengineering is perferred. 

Presentation titles in the International symposium of current problems in solid mechanics in honor of Prof. R.J. Clifton can be found in the link: http://maeresearch.ucsd.edu/markenscoff/symi_2012/symposium_program_2012.pdf

This paper uses the thermodynamic data of aqueous solutions of uncrosslinked poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) to study the phase transition of PNIPAM hydrogels.  At a low temperature, uncrosslinked PNIPAM  can be dissolved in water and form a homogenous liquid  solution.  When the temperature is increased, the solution separates into two liquid phases with different concentrations of the polymer.   Covalently crosslinked PNIPAM, however, does not dissolve in water, but can imbibe water and form a hydrogel.  When the temperature is changed

This paper studies the poroelastic behavior of an alginate hydrogel by a combination of theory and experiment. The gel—covalently crosslinked, submerged in water and fully swollen—is suddenly compressed between two parallel plates. The gap between the plates is held constant subsequently, and the force on the plate relaxes while water in the gel migrates. This experiment is analyzed by using the theory of linear poroelasticity.