Blog posts

As I promised, I start with some brief notes on themes loved by Ken Johnson to hopefully raise some interest for discussion on iMechanica. Regards, Mike

Are not as high as we expected although very stiff and strong nanotubes or nanofibers (Young’s modulus E~1000GPa) are added into soft polymer matrices like epoxy (E~4GPa).  In our early investigation on the  systematic mechanical property characterizations of nanocomposites (Xu et al., Journal of Composite Materials, 2004--among top 5 in 2005;and top 10 in 2006 of the Most-Frequently-Read Articles in Journal of Composite Materials.) have shown that there was a very small increase (sometimes even decrease) of critical ultimate tensile/bending strengths, and mode-I fracture toughnesses in spite of complete chemical treatments of the interfacial bonding area, and uniform dispersions of nanofibers (click to view a TEM image). Similar experimental results were often reported in recent years. Therefore, mechanics analysis is extremely valuable before we make these “expensive” nanocomposite materials. Our goal is to provide in-depth mechanics insight, and future directions for nanocomposite development. Till now, nanocomposite materials are promising as multi-functional materials, rather than structural materials. Here we mainly focus on two critical parameters for structural materials: tensile strength and fracture toughness. We notice that other mechanical parameters such as compressive strengths and Young’s moduli of nanocomposite materials have slight increase over their matrices.

In December 2007 Elsevier will organise the 2nd International Conference on Mechanics of Biomaterials & Tissues (www.icmobt.elsevier.com). The aim of the conference is to provide a forum for the discussion of the modeling and measurement of deformation and fracture behavior in biological materials and in those materials which are used to replace them in the human body.

The response of low-dimensional solid objects combines geometry and physics in unusual ways, exemplified in structures of great utility such as a thin-walled tube that is ubiquitous in nature and technology.

When I was a graduate student, I spent several months to measure interfacial toughness between metalic (Cu and Au) films and thick substrates(Si and Polycarbonate). My methods were bulge test (blistering test) and 4-point bending test. I had many problems such as making an initial crack(pre-cracking), changing load phase angle applied to specimens, preparing/patterning thin films, constructing my own test apparatus, etc. The biggest problem was to measure the interfacial toughness over a wide range of loading phase angle. For a bimaterial with a non-zero oscillatory index(epsilon), we don't know the phase angle for a minimum interfacial toughness beforehand. Therefore, we need to measure the interfacial toughness over a wide range of phage angle. For engineering purpose, we need a minimum interfacial toughness value for reliability design because this value will lead to a conservative design of systems.

Given link is for a stochastic micromechanical model developed for predicting probabilistic characteristics of elastic mechanical properties of an isotropic functionally graded material (FGM) subject to statistical uncertainties in material properties of constituents and their respective volume fractions.