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Who owns your content? Is it you or the copyright holder? If it isn't you, then why did you pay for it? All these questions are at the heart of the current war for the rights to music, movies, and everything in between.

The first shots of this war were fired with the start of the digital age. Before, the best you could was make physical copies of media. Technically possible, yes, but the equipment and manpower needed to run an operation on a scale large enough to threaten publishers was nearly impossible to obtain without being noticed.

Recently, during one of my net searches, I came across this page of RPI, where I learnt about a couple of numerical mechanics software which might be of interest to some of you.

FMDB:

As for the effort toward the scalable engineering simulations on distributed environements, we addressed this challenge by developing a distributed mesh data management infrastructure that satisfies the needs of distributed domain of applications.

At the 2007 ASME Applied Mechanics and Materials Conference (McMat 2007)

June 3-7, 2007, Austin, Texas

I plan to explore the Saint-Venant torsion problem applied to prismatic bars with elastic-plastic behavior. Wagner and Gruttmann have developed a finite element method to obtain the elastic/plastic stresses of a bar using a single load step. In particular, I will present the constitutive model that they have developed, and then use ABAQUS to apply Wagner and Gruttmann’s model to various cross-sections. I will try to reproduce their results for some simple cross-sections, as well as exploring some more complicated cross sections.

Dislocations are common in epitaxial systems. For a thin film epitaxially grown on a substrate with coherent interface, it may have spontaneously-formed dislocations when its thickness is larger than certain value, i.e. critical thickness. The presence of dislocations can have an adverse effect on electrical performance of semiconductor materials, providing easy diffusion paths for dopants to lead to short circuits, or recombination centers to reduce carrier density. And, formation of dislocations is one of the most observed mechanisms of relaxation of mismatch strain. However, in optoelectric applications, strain alters the electronic bandgap and band edge alignment, and should be maintained. So, controlling formation of dislocations is very important in the manufacture of microelectronic and optoelectronic devices.

This term paper will review some basic concepts and try to produce some understanding about the control dislocation formation.

Today low-k dielectric materials are integrated into computer chips to improve the operation speed and reduce the cross-talk noise. Due to weak mechanical properties of low-k dielectric materials, cohesive failure is subjected to occur. Channel cracking is one common mode of cohesive failure. In this term paper, several potential issues relevant to channel cracking of low-k dielectric thin films are reviewed.

The mechanical performance of a homogeneous material can be varied by the addition of second-phase particles. In this project, we will model a planar composite under plastic deformation. As shown on the following figure, the composite consists of matrix material and randomly-distributed inclusion particles. The matrix is assumed to be an elastic-plastic material with isotropic or kinematic hardenings, and the inclusion particle pure elastic with a higher Young’s modulus. The stress/strain field throughout the composite will be calculated numerically with finite element method.