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.
Please find below the announcement for the NSF Summer Institute on Nano Mechanics and Materials:
My googling today brought me to this treasure trove of write-ups in mechanics:
This site contains informal (usually rough draft) technical notes and tutorials on topics in mechanics. The sophistication is at the first or second year graduate level. These write-ups include:
Prior courses in solid mechanics:
Eric Mockensturm has just posted a publication agreement proposed by provosts of several universities. In structuring iMechanica, we have tried to avoid the question of open access, and simply asked the question what if all papers are already openly accessible. Many mechanicians have discovered iMechanica, and the registered users have recently passed 1000. Recent discussions of copyright on iMechanica have prompted Eric to post his entry, which has just led to this one.
Last year I spent three months modeling the compressive behavior of aluminum alloy foams. I had hoped to find some evidence of the banding instability that is often observed in elastomeric foams [1]. Lakes writes that this sort of banding instability provides indirect experimental evidence for negative shear modulus [2].
