iMechanica

See attachment for announcement of a Structural FEA Engineer position at Schlumberger's Sugar Land Product Center
 in Sugar Land, Texas.  If interested, please respond to Sepand Ossia (sossia@slb.com).

A cohesive law for carbon nanotube/polymer interfaces based on the van der Waals force (JOURNAL OF THE MECHANICS AND PHYSICS OF SOLIDS 54 (11): 2436-2452 NOV 2006)

Authors: Jiang, L.Y., Huang, Y., Jiang, H., Ravichandran, G., Gao, H., Hwang, K.C. and Liu, B. 

Our paper on the Mechanical threshold stress (MTS) model for 6061-T6 aluminum has been accepted by JoMMS.  There are several things of interest in the paper:

1) The use of a phonon drag model to predict the sharp increase in flow stress at strain rates above 10,000 /s.  This behavior is seen in a  number of materials and is hard to fit using standard power law plasticity models.  Our model does a good job in this regard.

Hello every body,

As most of you know, fracture mechanics of polymer materials needs a special consideration of the viscoelastic material properties. Especially under thermomechanical loading the role of glass transition temperature T_g is very important. That is why people try to characterize the material with different methods including stress relaxation based on Time-Temperature superposition or DMA test.

To: Engineers, Fracture Analysts, Mechanicians, Physicists...

In science and engineering, we have an excellent tradition: naming a physical unit using the name of a prominent personality from the concerned field. For example, in SI system, we measure force in newton, work in joule, power in watt...

But the unit of fracture toughness, i.e. KIC, is too lengthy to pronounce: (mega) pascal-underoot-meter. Further, it has also been in use for something like half a century by now, perhaps more. So, how do you like the idea of giving a name to this unit?

• G. M. Whitesides, Writing a paper. Advanced Materials 15, 1375-1377, 2004.  This three-page essay by a prolific professor at Harvard advocates a process:  start writing a paper at the same time you start a research project.  Every thinking person should read this essay, and give the process a try.

Jan D. Achenbach, Walter P. Murphy Professor and McCormick School Distinguished Professor at Northwestern University was presented a 2005 National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush on July 27. Achenbach, who  is well known in the mechanics community, was honored for his seminal contributions to engineering research and education in the area of wave propagation in solids and for pioneering the field of quantitative non-destructive evaluation. Previously, Achenbach received a 2003 National medal of Technology from President Bush.

Since I am an alum of the University of Minnesota, when I was a PhD student I lived only a few blocks from the site of yesterday's catastrophic bridge collapse in Minneapolis.  The statics analysis of a truss is almost the first thing learned by every undergraduate engineering student, and appears to be relevant here.  It is interesting to see words like "fatigue crack" and "vibrations" in the news .  In light of such events,

House Passes $600 Million Increase in National Science Foundation Budget July 27, 2007 --The U.S. House of Representatives passed an appropriations bill that would increase funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) by nearly $600 million or 10 percent to $6.5 billion in fiscal year 2008.  The bill would put NSF on track to double its budget in less than 10 years.

Cambridge University Press and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics are delighted to announce the launch of The Batchelor Prize, sponsored by the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, to be awarded in recognition of outstanding research in fluid mechanics.

Attached is a post-print of one of my journal papers submitted in 2005.  A brief description of my paper is as follows:

ASSOCIATE or ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
EXPERIMENTAL MECHANICS OF MATERIALS

Within the last two weeks the US National Science Foundation (NSF) published not one but two studies on (a) the attitudes of scientists and engineers to the changing world of publication, and (b) the relative global productibity of US science & engineering as measured by journal publication.    

These are not dense 500 page reports, but short, readable (10-15 min.).  I think iMechanica readers will find them relevant and interesting:

I've been to two conferences this year and I've again seen the same annoying features in many talks that have been warned against by numerous people over the years.

Here are some tips that might come in handy :

http://tinyurl.com/2ud2wn

Long URL: (http://www.scitizen.com/screens/blogPage/viewBlog/
sw_viewBlog.php?idTheme=5&idContribution=907
&PHPSESSID=c9ee7a1c644fb35c57fab30f6e0aafdf)

The above was written for the interested layperson who wants to learn more about science. It provides some context for our manuscript that has recently appeared in Nature.

2 Research Associate Positions in
the
Dynamic Properties of Engineering Materials and Structures

From Northwestern Engineering:

In a paper published July 26 in the journal Nature, researchers led by Rod Ruoff, John Evans Professor of Nanoengineering in the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, report on the development of "graphene oxide paper."

Recently, Prof. Suo and several of us students have been discussing the possibility of increasing student presence and activity on iMechanica . With this in mind, two of us: Mahdi Kazemzadeh and I, have identified three important issues we would like to get your thoughts on. Please comment and let us know what you think, even if you are not a student. Also, if you wish to add any more issues you think we should look at, please post your thoughts in this regard as well.

The mechanical engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University is now advertising faculty positions. Ranked by US News & World Report as a top 10 graduate engineering program and a Top 25 undergraduate university, Carnegie Mellon might be a good fit for someone that you know.

We invite you to submit an abstract for the poster sessions in the International Workshop on SMART DEVICES: MODELING OF MATERIAL SYSTEMS Jan 10-12, 2008. IIT MADRAS, Chennai.  INDIA.    (pl. note: VERY LIMITED SLOTS ARE AVAILABLE IN THE POSTER SESSIONS) www.sdmoms.org

--> 15 Aug 2007:  Deadline for abstract submission (poster sessions only)

--> 20 Aug 2007:  End of abstract selection (poster sessions only).

--> 20 Aug 2007:   Deadline for early registration (authors and delegates)

Professorship in the Mechanics of Materials Division
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Imperial College London

Imperial College is one of Europe's leading teaching and research institutions and the Department of Mechanical Engineering had the highest possible rating in the last Research Assessment Exercise.