Two PhD scholarships, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, are currently available in the Department of Geotechnical Engineering and Geosciences at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) (Barcelona, Spain). The PhD positions are associated to the Project “Progressive failure and the reactivation of big landslides: Analysis, prediction and risks (BIG RISK)” with Professor Eduardo Alonso and Professor Jordi Corominas as principal researchers.

Looking back at episodes of our lives, we reflect on how people meet and how such meetings change lives.  Information technology, broadly interpreted as means of communication among people, is always part of these narratives.  But central to such narratives are nearly always people themselves and the content of their communication, rather than the means of their communication. 

Hi, everyone

I am a student. I am  dealing with a failure problem of brittle spheres. These have a lot of flaws inside.I did some compression tests. Single spheres are crushed by a pair of parallel plates. I got the crush load distribution (in terms of critical contact force). 

My question is:

is there a failure criterion/model which relates to load(critical contact force), Youngs moduli and Poisson ratios of shpere and plates, radius and friction coefficient?

For my graduation work (student at the Delft university of Technology, The Netherlands), I am trying to model the aeroelastic behavior of a wind turbine rotor. For this end I use an Abaqus model of a wind turbine blade (which is a composite structure with different fiber layers and corresponding orientation). The aerodynamic force is calculated by a BEM code (Blade Element Momentum theory), which is a simplified engineering aerodynamic code: fast but still quite good. Using CFD to calculate the loads is out of the question since it requires far too much time to calculate.

The ability to control the domain patterns in ferroelectric nanostructures holds promise as a method to tailor physical properties for specific applications. We proposed a new way to control the domain patterns in ferroelectric nanostructures. Desirable domain patterns can be obtained through different surface charges. The surface charges can be supplied by the atomic and molecular adsorbates on the surfaces of ferroelectric nanostructures.

The deadline for abstracts for the 21st Annual Melosh Competition has been extended until January 30.  All interested graduate students are encouraged to apply.

 This competition for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis will be held at Duke University on Friday, April 24, 2009.  The competition has become one of the premier graduate student events in the broad area of computational mechanics.