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Although nanostructures, such as nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanowires, nanobelts, and nanometer thick films, nanostructured materials and nanocomposites have been synthesized and fabricated by various techniques, their mechanical properties have not been well explored. These nanostructures are being used as structural and functional building blocks to construct micro/nanodevices. Some nanostructured materials exhibit the breakdown of Hall-Petch behavior. The failure of conventional reinforcing models has been found in nanocomposites. The extremely small dimensions of nanomaterials and micro/nanodevices impose tremendous challenges to many existing experimental techniques and modeling tools. An in-depth understanding of mechanics at the nanoscale is greatly needed. Development of mechanical testing, and manipulation instruments and techniques, is also a technological necessity. This symposium will focus on research on mechanical properties of nanostructures, nanostructured materials and nanocomposites, and reliability testing of micro/nanodevices.

Rui Huang's post early today reminded me of writing to all of you who are going to ASME meeting in Chicago, 5-10 November 2006, a short 10 days from today.

As I wrote in September, much of the initial planning for the next year's Congress will happen at the committee meetings this year. These meetings will formulate possible topics for symposiums in the next Congress. Surely you would like to see your favorite topics get picked.

Meetings of all Technical Committees are open to all. Please find the meeting times of the Technical Committees that interest you. You may also want to know who are the Chairs of the 17 Technical Committees in the Applied Mechanics Division.

In response to a proposal by Zhigang Suo in November 2005, the Executive Committee of the Applied Mechanics Division (AMD) of ASME has created a new Technical Committee on Integrated Structures. The main purpose is to provide a home at AMD for those who are working in the interdisciplinary areas involving applied mechanics and integrated materials/structures such as microelectronics and biomedical technologies. Read more here.

To forge the link between academia and industries, the committee will be co-chaired by industrial and academic members. For the first year, Jun He of Intel and Rui Huang (myself) have served as the co-chairs. As the 2006 ASME Congress (November 5-10) coming around the corner, we would like to draw your attention to our first activities at the congress.

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.

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.

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.

Open Faculty Positons:

• Computational Mechanics
• Multiscale Environmental Fluid Dynamics
• Smart Structures and Intelligent Systems

Open Faculty Position in Computational Mechanics

The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University seeks applicants for a tenure-track faculty position in the area of computational mechanics. The appointment will be commensurate with the candidate’s experience and accomplishments and can be at the assistant, associate or full professor rank, beginning August 2007. At the time of appointment, candidates must have an earned doctorate in engineering or a related field.

The SES 2007 Conference, Oct. 21-24, 2007, Texas A&M University campus in College Station, Texas, home to the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

Call for abstract

Advances in the research of the theory of Piezoelectricity and Acoustic Waves have provided essential foundation and new opportunities to device technology and have been fostering academic exchanges and interaction in the piezoelectric device industry.With the increased research activities in piezoelectricity and acoustic waves and recent fast growth in piezoelectric devices, we are also facing many technological challenges from real engineering applications and product design and manufacturing.Following the successful SPAWDA 2004 in Ningbo, Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, IEEE UFFC and the Acoustical Society of China have decided, also with industrial support, to hold the SPAWDA 2006 at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China from December 14-17.The conference topics include, but not limited to,