Blog posts

The IUTAM Symposium "150 Years of Vortex Dynamics" will be held October 12-17, 2008, at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in Lyngby, and in Copenhagen, Denmark. The rationale behind the title is that H. von Helmholtz published his seminal paper enunciating his three laws of vortex dynamics in 1858.

The Scientific Committee, consisting of Profs. Keith Moffatt (Cambridge), Paul Newton (Los Angeles), Slava Meleshko (Kiev), Morten Brøns (Copenhagen), GertJan van Heijst (Eindhoven), Shigeo Kida (Kyoto), and H. Aref (Copenhagen and Blacksburg) has been constituted.

By Michael H . Suo and Zhigang Suo

While browsers have improved greatly in recent years, we have noticed that many academics are still missing out on important functions. In this post, we will focus on Firefox, an open-source browser that has recently gained popularity. Note: this is not a Microsoft-bashing article. Internet Explorer 7 is a very functional modern browser, but for the reasons below, we like Firefox better.

I think that the note by Zhigang Suo puts forth a pressing issue. Coming from remotely related areas in physics (quantum mechanics and electromagnetic theory), my own interests and work have recently evolved to topics in both solid mechanics (crystal surfaces) and aspects of fluid mechanics (advection-diffusion and a most recent start on biomembranes). Hence, practically, I cannot see any boundaries between these disciplines.

The Department of Energy and Refrigerating Air-Conditioning Engineering at National Taipei University of Technology (NTUT) invites applications for one tenure-track faculty position in the area of ENERGY. Ph.D. in engineering is required. The position starts on August 1, 2007. Duties include teaching and research. The due day for application is on March 1, 2007.

For many mechanicians and materials scientists one of the most confounding things (in the ever increasing literature on carbon nanotubes) is the reported theoretical value of the nanotube elastic modulus. Depending upon the specific paper at hand, the reported numerical values range from 1 -6 TPa!

Initially posted on Applied Mechanics News on 28 April 2007.

Hot rolling from ingot is the dominant fabrication method of producing plate, sheet, and foil aluminum products. It is a striking fact that the total rolling-plant recovery of aluminum process from ingot to final products is typically about 50%. This recovery loss causes enormous amount of energy waste both as remelt energy and energy to process material that is just recycled. Assuming the annual US domestic net shipments of sheet and plate products being 10,500 million lb, 10% improvement of the hot rolling recovery will result annual savings of $126 million per year for the US domestic aluminum industry. The annual domestic energy savings would be 2.54 trillion Btu. The environmental benefits include annual reduction of 2.32 million lb SOx , 1.01 million lb NOx, 303.2 million lb CO2, 0.67 million lb of particulate, and 11000 lb VOCsd .

The fundamental inability to reduce or eliminate these recovery losses is “lack of the integrated models that relate structural properties to manufacturing processes”. Currently, processing parameters are determined by trial and error and largely based on experience. This makes it difficult to optimize the process even on the macroscale level, and almost impossible from microstructure level. Research in the following areas are desirable:

The number of registered iMechanicians has just passed 1000 today. iMechanica went "officially" online on 9 September 2006. See other numbers of iMechanica recorded today, and our evolving history.