Blog posts

If a car filled with water is accelerated at uniform rate, and a heavy object is hanged by a string from the top of the car and a balloon with a string from the bottom of the car. What would be the direction of deflection of balloon & the heavy object. I would appreciate if someone could explain to me the phenomena of deflection, which would be helpful for me to better understand the topic please.

A previous work suggested a critical condition to form surface creases in elastomers and gels. For elastomers, the critical condition seems to have closed a gap between experimental observations (e.g., by bending a rubber block) and the classical instability analysis by Biot. For gels, however, experiments have observed a wide range of critical swelling ratios, from around 2 to 3.7. Here we present a linear perturbation analysis for swollen hydrogels confined on a rigid substrate, which predicts critical swelling ratios in a similar range.

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM - Registration is open

Thin Film and Small-Scale Mechanical Behavior

July 25 - 30, 2010 at Colby College, Waterville, Maine

Online Application:

http://www.grc.org/application.aspx?id=9398

Preliminary Program:

These notes were initially written when I taught fracture mechanics in spring 2010.  The title of the notes was then "stress intensity factor".  In revising the notes for the class in 2014, I have changed the title of the notes to "crack-tip field".

You can access all notes for the course on fracture mechanics. 

A research position is now opening in the field of Computational Mechanics of granular materials, in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. This position should start between May and September 2010, and is a full-time fixed-term PostDoc position for 2 years (TVL E13).