Jianliang Xiao's blog

Recent Progress in Curvilinear Electronics and Mechanics

Jianliang Xiao

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder

1. Introduction

Professor John Rogers, Swanlund Chair Professor of Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Congratulations to John!

Here is the link to the NAS press release: http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/april-28-2015-NAS-Election.html

Professor John Rogers is the recepient of the Robert Henry Thurston Lecture Award this year, and he will give the Thurston Lecture at 10am on Monday, November 18 during the ASME IMECE 2013. The location is the Elizabeth Ballroom (section H), 2nd floor at the Manchester Grand Hyatt.

The Department of Mechanical Engineering at the
University of Colorado Boulder invites applications for a tenure-track faculty
position in the area of Solid Mechanics. 

Many people from mechnaics community will receive prestigious awards from ASME this year.

Ted Belytschko will receive the ASME Honorary Membership;
Wei Cai will receive the Tom Hughes Young Investigator Medal;
T.W. Chou will receive the Nadai Medal;
Richard Christensen will receive the Timoshenko Medal;
Normal Fleck will receive the Koiter Medal;
Yonggang Huang will receive the Drucker Medal;
Sia Nemat-Nasser will receive the ASME Medal;
Ting Zhu and Vicky Nguyen will receive the Sia Nemat-Nasser early career medal.

In today's (May 2) issue of Nature, we report a recent achievement in applying mechanics principles of stretchable electronics and optics to create biologically inspired artificial compound eye cameras. It was also highlighted in the Nature News & Views, "Optical devices: Seeing the world through an insect's eyes".

We are organizing a symposium on "Mechanics of Adhesion and Friction", in the upcoming ASME IMECE 2013 to be held in San Diego, during Nov 15-21, 2013. You are cordially invited to submit abstracts to this symposium, which is numbered as "10-20 Symposium on Mechanics of Adhesion and Friction". The abstract submission deadline is February 7, 2013. 

Calvin W. Rice Lecture
9:45am- 11:00am, Tuesday, November 13
Wei Yang, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China 
Presentation Title: Dynamic Growth of Research Universities in China

Robert Henry Thurston Lecture
10:00am- 12 noon, Monday, November 12
Zhigang Suo, Harvard University
Presentation Title: Soft Materials and Soft Machines

Dear Colleagues:

We are writing to invite you to submit abstracts to the symposium "Mechanics of Thin Film and Multilayer Structures" (Symposium IV.11) at the upcoming SES 49th Annual Technical Meeting to be held in Georgia Tech during Oct. 10-12, 2012.

Adhesion has long been an important issue for mechanics and
many other disciplines. Its influence spans macro-, micro-, nano- and molecular
scales. When size goes down, adhesion plays a more and more significant role.
Many important technologies attribute to adhesion, such as transfer printing
for advanced microfabrication, super adhesives inspired by gecko foot hairs,
and self-assembly. Adhesion also has strong implications on the behavior of
nanomaterials (such as nanotubes and graphenes) and biological systems (such as
cells). This minisymposium "Mechanics of Adhesion" is to provide a

Yang Wei wants to reform attitudes towards research ethics at Zhejiang University and across the country.

Yang Wei has an easy smile and a carefree, even distracted, air — but he takes such a solemn approach to life that his wife sometimes tells him to relax. “I take everything seriously,” he says.

I am currently accepting applications for two Ph.D. students starting in Spring or Fall 2012. The students will join my research group (http://www.colorado.edu/MCEN/people/faculty/xiao.html ) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Colorado Boulder. 

Adhesion has long been an important issue for mechanics and many other disciplines. Its influence spans macro-, micro-, nano- and molecular scales. When size goes down, adhesion plays a more and more significant role. Many important technologies attribute to adhesion, such as transfer printing for advanced microfabrication,  super adhesives inspired by gecko foot hairs, and self-assembly. Adhesion also has strong implications on the behavior of nanomaterials (such as nanotubes and graphenes) and biological system (such as cells).

Professors John Rogers and Ares Rosakis were elected to NAE, among the 68 new NAE members. 

John A. Rogers, Lee J. Flory-Founder Chair in Engineering, department of materials science and engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For novel electronic and optoelectronic devices and systems.

Professor Yonggang Huang is selected to receive the 2010 Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award.

Graphene edges, analogous to the structure of nanotubes, can significantly influence the overall electronic and magnetic properties of graphene nanostructures, and thus have become important issues in graphene research, especially for electronic applications. In this recent paper published on PRL, we reported that the free folding of suspended graphene sheets by random mechanical stimulation has preferred folding directions.

A review paper on stretchable electronics written by Professors John A. Rogers, Takao Someya, and Yonggang Huang was published in a recent issue of Science . This paper gives a nice summary on the recent advances in inorganic and organic stretchable electronics. Materials, structures and mechanics of these systems are discussed. Many attractive applications of stretchable electronics are introduced, such as stretchable silicon circuit, electronic eyeball camera, and flexible LED display. 

In this paper recently feature on the cover of Science Translational Medicine, we report the development of a class of mechanically flexible silicon electronics for multiplexed measurement of signals in an intimate, conformal integrated mode on the dynamic, three-dimensional surfaces of soft tissues in the human body. Mechanics model shows that the strain in the fragile materials, e.g. silicon, is several orders of magnitude smaller than the fracture strain, when wrapped onto the curvilinear cardiac surface.

In this recently published paper on Nanotechnology, we studied the in-surface buckling mechanics of one dimensional nanomaterials on elastomeric substrates.  Simple analytical solutions are obtained for buckling wavelength and amplitude, which can be easily applied to the in-surface buckling of different nanomaterials, such as nanowires and nanotubes.  It is shown that in-surface buckling of nanomaterials has lower energy than out-of-surface buckling, which explains the experimental observance of

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) possess extraordinary electrical and mechanical properties, with many possible applications in electronics and materials science. Dense, horizonally aligned arrays of linearly configured SWNTs represent perhaps the most attractive and scalable way to implement this class of nanomaterial in practical systems. Recent work shows that templated growth of tubes on certain crystalline substrates (e.g. quartz) yields arrays with the necessary levels of perfection, as demonstrated by the formation of devices and full systems on quartz.