iMechanica

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

In between stress and strain, which one is the more fundamental physical quantity? Or is it the case that each is defined independent of the other and so nothing can be said about their order? Is this the case?

A recent string of papers originated from Persson's paper in the physics literature contain a number of interesting new ideas, but compare, of the many theories for randomly rough surfaces, only Persson's and Bush et al, BGT. These papers often assume the original Greenwood and Williamson (GW) theory [1] to be inaccurate, but unfortunately do not test it, assuming BGT to be its better version. The original GW however is, I will show below, still the best paper and method today (not surprisingly, as not many papers have the level of 1300 citations), containing generally less assumptions than any other model, including the constitutive equation which does not need to be elastic! I just submitted this Letter to the Editor: On "Contact mechanics of real vs. randomly rough surfaces: A Green's function molecular dynamics study" by C. Campaña and M. H. Müser, EPL, 77 (2007) 38005. C. Campaña and M. H. Müser also make several questionable statements, including a dubious interpretation of their own results, and do not even cite the original GW paper; hence, we find useful to make some comments.

A sponge is an elastic solid with connected pores. When immersed in water, the sponge absorbs water. When a saturated sponge is squeezed, water will come out. More generally, the subject is known as diffusion in elastic solids, or elasticity of fluid-infiltrated porous solids, or poroelasticity. The theory has been applied to diverse phenomena. Here are a few examples.

It is well known that the algebra associated with edge dislocations can be forbidding. As Prof. Frank (of the Frank-Read source fame) noted once,

We report the direct molecular dynamics simulations for molecular ball bearings composed of fullerene molecules (C60 and C20) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes. The comparison of friction levels indicates that fullerene ball bearings have extremely low friction (with minimal frictional forces of  5.283×10-7 nN/atom and  6.768×10-7 nN/atom  for C60 and C20 bearings) and energy dissipation (lowest dissipation per cycle of  0.013 meV/atom  and  0.016 meV/atom  for C60 and C20 bearings). A single fullerene inside the ball bearings exhibits various motion statuses of mixed translation and rotation. The influences of the shaft's distortion on the long-ranged potential energy and normal force are discussed. The phonic dissipation mechanism leads to a non-monotonic function between the friction and the load rate for the molecular bearings.

The discovery of a new material type, graphene and extremely thin platelets of graphite, was discussed in several articles from my research group published in 1999:

Lu XK, Huang H, Nemchuk N, and Ruoff RS, Patterning of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite by oxygen plasma etching, APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS, 75, 193-195 (1999).

In the very beginning of 2007 I have four papers published or accepted (one is independent research and others are collaborated). All of them are the work done in my doctoral period. The topic is focusing on the enhancement of creep resistance of polymers by incorporating of nanofillers including particles and CNTs.

Tom Ting and I have recently developed a method of extending Stroh's anisotropic formalism to problems in three dimensions. The unproofed paper can be accessed at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jbarber/Stroh.pdf .

I would like to share the research work I have been pursuing over the past four years. I believe, through this forum, I will be able to reach researchers with various backgrounds and expertise. Suggestions and comments from members will be very useful. I am also attaching links to preprints of manuscripts describing this work. Please follow these links:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~vikramg/academic/Preprints/QC-OFDFT.pdf

The increasing use of fiber-reinforced composites accentuates the need for developing multi-axial fatigue failure models for these materials. In this article (attached), we proposed several multiaxial fatigue failure models for fiber-reinforced composites considering the contribution of mean and cyclic normal stress/strain and shear stress/strain at the plane of failure and examined their capability for predicting the fatigue life of the E-glass/epoxy composite materials.