oliver oreilly's blog

Dear Colleague, 

I'm pleased to announce our latest paper on configurational mechanics has just appeared in Acta Mechanica:

Nathaniel N. Goldberg and Oliver M. O’Reilly. A Material Momentum Balance Law for Shells and Plates with Application to Phase Transformations and Adhesion. Acta Mechanica, 2022.

Open Access is kindly provided by UC Berkeley Library.

Dear Colleague

Our (open access) paper on the post-touchdown dynamics of an electrostatically actuated MEMS device has just appeared in IJSS:

Nate N. Goldberg and Oliver M. O'Reilly, Electrostatically actuated MEMS in the post-touchdown regime: The thin-dielectric limit and a novel reduced-order model for release dynamics"

Graphical Abstract can be found here

Dear Colleague,

I'm delighted to annouce that Alain Goriely (Oxford U) is visiting the Department of Mechanical  Engineering, UC Berkeley as a Russell Severence Springer Lecturer. 

He will be giving a colloquium later today and lectures in the coming weeks that are remotely accessible via the zoom link: 

Thanks to Weingarten’s formulae [1], which date to 1861, the bending deformation of a Kirchhoff-Love shell can be characterized by examining the variation of the unit normal vector to the surface of the shell. 

If you have ever had to study and teach classical mechanics, then one of the challenges is to explain the equivalences of distinct formulations of the equations of motion for discrete mechanical systems. It is not transparent, particularly in the presence of constraints, how the Newton-Euler equations, Lagrange’s equations, Gibbs-Appell equations, Maggi's equations, Kane’s equations, Boltzmann-Hamel equations, and several other fomulations, are equivalent.

Dear Colleague,

I'm pleased to announce the latest paper from my research group (coauthored with Evan Hemingway (PhD 2020)): 

Continuous models for peristaltic locomotion with application to worms and soft robots

has just been published in Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology. Here's a simulation of the model:

@UCBDynamicsLab

Dear Colleague,

It is well known that the straight configuration of a flexible vertical riser conveying fluid destabilizes in a divergence-type buckling instability once the velocity of the transporting fluid exceeds a critical speed. To compute the critical velocity, the dynamics of small amplitude perturbations to the straight configuration are computed. If the perturbations are sufficiently small and the transport speed is above a critical value, then the instability of the vertical riser can be detected.

Dear Colleague,

I'm delighted to inform you that the Department of Mechanical Engineering University of California, Berkeley, seeks candidates for a tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant Professor level, starting July 1, 2020 or on a mutually agreed date thereafter. The department seeks candidates with expertise in one or more of the following: Fluid Mechanics; Energy Science and Technology; Design and Manufacturing; and Control and Robotics.

In "Littlewood's Miscelleny" the celebrated mathematician John E. Littlewood noted that a hoop with an attached mass rolling on a ground plane may exhibit self-induced jumping. Subsequent works showed that his analysis was flawed and revealed paradoxical behavior that can be resolved by incorporating the inertia of the hoop.

I recently gave a talk to undergraduate engineering students at U.C. Berkekey on advice for applying to graduate schools in the US. The talk is titled "How to Apply to Graduate School and Fail to Get Admitted." The title is intended to be humorous. The audience was one of the most engaging that I have ever encountered and there were lots of requests for the slides.

Dear Colleague,

I write to bring your attention to a recent paper describing the use of a planar version of Bergou et al.'s discrete elastic rod theory to model and simulate a prototype caterpillar-inspired soft robot. The paper just appeared in Soft Robotics:

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/soro.2018.0104

Dear Colleague,

The third edition of my textbook Engineering Dynamics:  A Primer, has just been published by Springer and is freely accessible to faculty and students at

https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783030117443

Dear Colleague,

I am pleased to inform you that the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, seeks applications for one faculty position. The position is at the tenure-track, Assistant Professor level in the areas of Energy Science and Micro/Nanoscale Sensors and Systems.

Topics of specialization within these areas include but are not limited to:

The DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, University of California, Berkeley, has extended the deadline for candidates to apply to a tenured Associate or Professor level faculty position in the areas of Advanced Manufacturing, Design and/or Materials Engineering, including but not limited to:  Clean energy, green and sustainable manufacturing. Precision and cyber-manufacturing. 3-D additive and subtractive manufacturing. Design, including design theory, product design and design for manufacturability.

The DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, University of California, Berkeley, seeks applications for two faculty positions. One position is at the tenure-track, Assistant Professor level and is open to all areas of mechanical engineering including, but not limited to: (1) Biomechanical Engineering, (2) Control and Robotics, (3) Design, (4) Dynamics, (5) Energy Science and Technology, (6) Fluid Mechanics, (7) Manufacturing, (8) Materials, (9) Solid Mechanics, (10) Micro and Nano Science and Engineering, and (11) Ocean and Offshore Engineering.

Readers of this site might be interested in the following paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and has received considerable attention in the media:

The roles of impact and inertia in the failure of a shoelace knot

The paper discusses a mechanism for the the accidental untying of a shoelace knot that many of us, including me, experience on a daily basis. The failure is sudden and catastropic as can be seen in the following video: