iMechanica

I came across some content I used to have on my webpage a long time ago.

http://www.ce.cmu.edu/~amita/webpage_misc.html

Hopefully it is inspirational for that bright, young, graduate student waiting in the wings to usher in the revolution that shows us how to solve some of the outstanding theoretical problems of solid mechanics that we seem to put off  e.g. concrete, quantitative methods for calculating time-dependent microstructure in plasticity and its effect on time-dependent macroscopic properties.....

At the 2007 ASME Congress, in Seattle, Professor Wing Kam Liu won the 2007 Robert Henry Thurston Lecture Award.  Wing Kam was a past chair of the Applied Mechanics Division, and has made seminal contributions in the field of computational mechanics.

A new report has been published on the "leaky pipeline" question:

A persistent problem. Traditional gender roles hold back female scientists 

Rather than scratching heads when faced with a seemingly impossible contradiction in a job, engineers could do worse than apply the Triz theory.

There has been quite a buzz around Triz, the Russian theory of problem solving, for some time. Since it was fully refined in the mid-1980s its use has been slowly spreading as word gets round, much like the increasing popularity of a political movement.

Applied Mechanics Division Banquet, Sheraton Hotel, Seattle, Washington, November 13th, 2007.

In order to try and get some of the vast store of engineering information we're sitting on out to a wider audience we've created a number of occasional subject guides for engineers and students. The aim is to highlight sources of information available from our Library and the Institution itself.

You can see an example of one of these (for the aerospace industry) here, from which you can browse to a whole host of others.

Please note the website and bookings page for the 2nd Investing in Alternative Energy event 1 February 2008, IMechE can be found at:

www.imeche.org/events/investing

The official brochure will be available shortly.

Further information

For information about speaking, hosting a discussion booth, attending as a delegate, or any form of sponsorship please contact Jason Williams on +44 (0)20 7973 1273 or j_williams@imeche.org

What is the relationship between hardness and elastic modulus? The higher hardness, the higher elastic modulus?  My understanding is that hardness is a local mechanical property, and 
elastic modulus is an averaged global mechanical property.  Am I right about this? 

As a courtesy to mechanical professionals and academics at large, I would like to inform you about the current free access period to mechanical research including the following journals:

Journal of Damage Mechanics
Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids

From now until November 30, 2007, you can access any materials science, mechanics or engineering journals online (from volume 1, issue 1 to current) free of charge!

The abstract submission deadline for this next conference in the biennial Engineering Failure Analysis series (www.icefa.elsevier.com) is 30 November 2007.

The conference will take place in the coastal town of Sitges, just a short distance from Barcelona's international airport, from 13 to 16 July 2008.    

I hope you can take the opportunity to network in Sitges with people of similar research interests at this informative and well-received single-stream conference. 

Best wishes

The Disease Biophysics Group in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has a postdoctoral fellowship available for PhD/DSc scientists with backgrounds in cellular biomechanics.  The applicants should have training in cell tissue culture, microscopy, and assays for probing the mechanical properties of cells, such as traction force microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and/or the use of magnetic tweezers.

 Applicants should forward their CV (pdf) and examples of up to three manuscripts (pdf). Please have three references emailed to Professor Parker directly.

We are no longer accepting applications for these positions.  Qualified applicants will be contacted in the near future.  

Thank you for your interest,

 Robert Gracie 

The abstract submission deadline for this next conference in the biennial Fatigue Damage of Structural Materials series (www.fatiguedamage.elsevier.com) is 28 November 2007.

The conference will take place will take place in Hyannis, MA, USA, 14-19 September 2008. Hyannis is located on the beautiful Cape Cod peninsula just 90 minutes from Boston's Logan International Airport and T.F.Green Airport in Providence.   

For a nanosystem,the total number of atoms(say less than 100),I want to knom In such a system the second law of thermodynamics is still effective ?

Call for Papers on Education in Mechanics

22nd International Congress on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM 2008)

Adelaide, Australia, August 24 – 30, 2008

Web page: http://dis.maths.adelaide.edu.au/~ictam2008/ 

The Cornell Fracture Group (CFG) has 2 new PhD student positions open on NASA-sponsored projects.

NASA Constellation University Institutes Project:  Develop a hierarchical, multi-scale simulator for damage tolerance and durability of advanced composite structures.

NASA Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control Project:  Develop a simulation capability to determine residual strength of damaged aircraft structure.

The Center for Cellular Mechanics at U of Illinois has recently hosted a week long summer workshop on Cell Mechano Sensitivity (July 30-Aug 3, 2007. The workshop had lectures in the morning an hands on-labs in the aternoons. All the lectures are on the web (with slides and video). They include a large collection of references. The web also has the laboratory protocols for cell culture, cell fixing and staining, single molecule detection, florescence microscopy, and much more. Visit the website:

www.ccm.uiuc.edu  

I am looking at problems of large deformation and large elastic strain in biological materials, using an analytical model that determines the current deformed state in a single step from the original undeformed state. The approach is to propose a strain energy function to allow the calculation of Piola-Kirchhoff 2 stresses which may then be converted to true Cauchy stresses via the usual mapping. Since I initially calculate PK2 stresses, the strain energy function must be a function of Green strain.

abstract:

Nanoscale materials, including thin films, quantum dots, nanowires, nanobelts, etc – are all structurally unique because they have a relatively high ratio of surface area to volume ratio.  This increase in surface area to volume ratio is important for nanomaterials because wide and unexpected variations in mechanical and other physical properties, such as thermal, electrical and optical, have been found to scale in some proportion to increase in surface area to volume ratio.

Faculty Opening - Assistant Professor.  Mechanical Engineering - Design, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University

The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (HSEAS) seeks applicants for a faculty position as a tenure track assistant professor in the area of mechanical engineering. The ideal candidate will have a strong interest and background in teaching design, as well as outstanding research capabilities. Areas of interest include mechanics and materials (particularly MEMS and NEMS), fluids, mechatronics, robotics, and biomechanics.

Brief description: The Advanced Computational Research Laboratory (http://acor.rpi.edu),
affiliated with the  Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear
Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA invites
applications for a postdoctoral research position to work in the area of in vivo / in situ soft tissue mechanical property estimation and modeling.