APS 2024 - Statistical Physics in Constitutive Modeling

We are organizing a Focus Topic "Statistical Physics in Constitutive Modeling" for the upcoming 2024 March Meeting of the American Physical Society (https://march.aps.org/). Please consider contributing an abstract once submissions open on August 31, and find the description below. This will be a exciting opportunity to connect with fellow reseachers in this area and discuss recent work. Questions to mrbuche@sandia.gov.

In order to complete the governing equations describing a material under mechanical, thermal, and other loads, a constitutive model for the material must be specified. While the frameworks of continuum mechanics and thermodynamics provide some guidelines for deriving these models, they tend not to provide any guidance regarding the atoms and molecules that constitute the material. In contrast, statistical physics provides exactly what is required, but cannot easily scale to the continuum level. As a result, many constitutive models for bulk materials, especially polymers, are actively being developed using statistical physics. This Focus Topic brings together these recent modeling efforts and seeks to connect with experiments.