iMechanica

This paper shows that the stress field in the classical theory of continuum mechanics
may be taken to be a covector-valued differential two-form. The balance laws and other funda-
mental laws of continuum mechanics may be neatly rewritten in terms of this geometric stress. A

Springer - in an attempt to get customers I suppose - are offering free access to the journal Computational Mechanics, but only for March 2007.

You can access all articles in Computational Mechanics back to vol 1/1, e.g. the first article

E. Reissner
Some aspects of the variational principles problem in elasticity
Volume 1, Issue - 1, First Page - 3, Last Page - 9
DOI - 10.1007/BF00298634
Link - http://www.springerlink.com/content/t52w761088542m68

To get the free access (for the rest of March) go to
http://scientific-direct.net/c.asp?id=650015&c=7fbfc8d9b40ac978&l=31

Please joint me in congratulating Dr. Stelios Kyriakides’ (Editor of International Journal of Solids and Structures) for his election to the United States National Academy of Engineering.

Since Dec. 2006, Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) has set up a biophysics research team that comprises research scientists in the fields of biophysics, solid mechanics and fluid mechanics, and has kicked off the "Computational Cancer Mechanics" project.

I was reading professor Zhigang Suo's post titled "What's Wrong with Applied Mechanics", thinking about the large amount of knowledge available. There are so many applications of mechanics that they seem endless in any subfield that one can think of. It made me recall some homework problems that wanted to include real life applications. However, real life applications tend to turn out much more complicated than what can be covered in one homework problem.

As the number of comments increases rapidly, how can anyone keep up? One answer is to use a RSS reader. The service is free, and takes 5 minutes to set up. It allows you to see all new comments at a glance, without clicking on individual ones. Once you have set up your Google Reader, paste the URL for the feed of comments crss

How to measure the temperature of a nanotube?

I have posted a movie showing a ring expansion experiment. A thin aluminum ring is made to expand through electromagnetic interaction at strain rates of about 10^4 per second. As the strain increases, numerous necks and fragments appear.

Resonance is a journal of science education published by the Indian Academy of Sciences for the past twenty years or so. As the introduction page states,

Dear friends and colleagues,

We will be organizing a GEM4 Summer School on Cell & Molecular Mechanics in Biomedicine (with a focus on Cancer) at the National University of Singapore from 25 June to 6 July 2007. It will also be held in conjunction with the GEM4 Conference on Cancer to be held from 1 to 6 July 2007.

by Juil Yoon, Zhen Zhang, Nanshu Lu, Zhigang Suo

As well pointed out by Journal Club of March 2007, the flexible electronics is an emerging technology.

dear Imechanica users,

a wonderful location for our annual italian conference in stress analysis -- see www.aias2007.it. It is organized by our collegues in Università di Napoli, Prof. Renato Esposito. Attached the call for papers in PDF, and more info are below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk

I was surprised several years ago when delving into the literature to not find any references about addition of nanoparticles to ice, to study their impact on the mechanics of ice.  In short, to make nanocomposites where the matrix is ice.  So, with 2 high school students from IMSA, the Illinois Math and Science Academy, we set about (with their limited time for a bit of research) to try adding some nanoparticles to water and to freeze it.  The students simply used their home freezers to do this, and their mechanics measurements were with a hammer and chisel...

Simpleware Ltd., the world leader in image-based meshing software, has signed an agreement with Gaitech International Ltd. to resell the Simpleware suite of software products in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao.

Simpleware software offers an advanced solution to problems that were previously intractable due to the complexity in geometry reconstruction. Simpleware's technology has opened up numerical analysis (CFD and FEA) to a variety of applications, including biomedical engineering, material characterisation and industrial reverse engineering.

We extend the pioneering work of J.E. Hirsch, the inventor of the h-index, by proposing a simple and seemingly robust approach for comparing the scientific productivity and visibility of institutions. Our main findings are that i) while the h-index is a sensible criterion for comparing scientists within a given field, it does not directly extend to rank institutions of disparate sizes and journals, ii) however, the h-index, which always increases with paper population, has an universal growth rate for large numbers of papers; iii) thus the h-index of a large population of papers can be decomposed into the product of an impact index and a factor depending on the population size, iv) as a complement to the h-index, this new impact index provides an interesting way to compare the scientific production of institutions (universities, laboratories or journals).

Modern Classical Physics Through the Work of G. I. Taylor

H. Mei, J.Y. Chung, H.-H. Yu, C.M. Stafford, and R. Huang, Buckling modes of elastic thin films on elastic substrates. Applied Physics Letters 90, 151902 (2007).

Two modes of thin film buckling are commonly observed, one with interface delamination (e.g., telephone cord blisters) and the other with no delamination (i.e., wrinkling). Which one would occur for your film?

We have just heard the great news that our colleague (iMechanician number 12), Joost Vlassak, has been promoted to Full Professor with Tenure at Harvard.

17 years ago, while a postdoc at IBM meant to be doing other things, I thought about the following. Then recently I visited Ali Argon at MIT, and we discussed conventional bubble rafts and how useful they had been in studies of some problems in mechanics...such as of defects and so on.

In the attached pre-print, we investigate quantum confinement induced strain in quantum dots. This paper has been written keeping in mind the condensed matter physics/quantum dot community (accepted for publication in Phy.

They filled a pool with a mix of cornstarch and water made on a concrete mixer truck. It becomes a non-newtonian fluid. When stress is applied to the liquid it exhibits properties of a solid. Video was recorded at Barcelona, Spain.

I am trying to find out the theoretical adhesive strength limit of a few materials, or more precisely the ratio adhesive strength limit to elastic modulus. I think this is after all part of the Lennard-Jones constants potential - theoretical adhesive strength limit is simply the maximum of the curve.

There have been several posts recently discussing new directions in computational mechanics. Here is a review article that appeared recently that may be of interest.

Large-scale hierarchical molecular modeling of nanostructured biological materials