Blog posts

The Fuel Cells and Solid State Chemistry Department at Risø National Laboratory, Denmark, is seeking a postdoc to work on the fracture mechanics of solid oxide fuel cells.

The work consists of theoretical analysis, computations as well as experimental work. You will work together with the people making cells and stacks, and with the fracture mechanics group in the Materials Research Department.

See full details at: http://www.risoe.dk/stillinger/Postdoc_ABF_271-06_uk.htm

I am pleased to announce that a new blolg associated with the International Journal of Fracture has been created by Springer. This is an ambitious project that aims to augment the published version of the papers and to create a dialogue between authors and readers. All articles beginning with the Dec 2004 issue now have a blog entry; ealier volumes will be added as digital processing of information continues. Discussion is not restricted to papers published in the journal, but should relate to the fracture/failure/structural integrity theme/micromechanics. Please see my post of Oct 25, 2006 for a detailed description of the obectives of the blog. I welcome your particpation in this experiment to enhance archival publication.

Dear Fellow ASME Micro & Nano Professionals :

There still is time to participate in the "Micro & Nano Society-Wide Forum" which will be held on Wednesday, November 8th, 5-8 pm, Williford Room C at the Chicago Hilton and Towers during ASME's Congress 2006.

The intention of this program is to stimulate cross-disciplinary knowledge-exchange, networking and synergy among ASME Members and other professionals interested in the development of nanotechnology. We extended the submission due date to Oct. 25th. (Previous one was a too short notice.)

A complimentary light dinner along with beverages will be provided during the program. All you need is your poster which will be tacked onto a poster board that is 96 inches by 48 inches (2.4 m by 1.2 m).

The effects of light propagation direction on the stress induced polarization dependence of silicon-based waveguide were studied. As silicon is an anisotropic material, the change of polarization dependence induced by the photoelastic effect depends on the light propagation directions. It is found that when the light propagates in <100> directions on {100} silicon, the changes of refractive index and polarization shift are about 20% more sensitive to the stress than those when the light propagates in <110> directions. (IEEE Photonic Technology Letters, vol. 18, No.

Getting papers published and getting proposals granted are often great challeges for young researchers, let alone being a good reviewer. The "Ten Simple Rules" series by P.E. Bourne, L.M. Chalupa, and A. Korngreen delineate what we should follow.

• Ten simple rules for getting published
• Ten simple rules for getting grants
  
• Ten simple rules for reviewers.

More details about writing a good paper and proposal were also given by G. M. Whitesides ("writing a paper") and M.F. Ashby ("how to write a paper").

I thought I should take advantage of iMechanica and obtain feedback on some recent work that we did on nonlinear stability analysis of patterns.

A paradigmatic model that governs monolayer self-assembly was constructed a few years back by Wei Lu (Michigan) and Zhigang Suo. Apart from obtaining several physical insights they also conducted a linear stability analysis of their model. Borrowing technqiues from the nonlinear physics community, our work presents nonlinear stability analysis i.e. the initial state is no longer homogeneous and stable states beyond the transition are calculated. This allows a detailed construction of stability maps for various patterns without extensive numerical calculations.

This work is currently under review and I am attaching a pre-print with this post. Any comments and suggestions would be well-appreciated.