iMechanica

The Mechanics of Materials Department performs experimental and analytical studies to understand the mechanical behavior of materials. Our experimental work covers the entire discoverycharacterization-
validation spectrum. Motivated by observations, we develop models to simulate material responses under various loading and environmental conditions. The fidelity of our models and simulations vary from atomic to continuum scales corresponding to the requirement of Sandia applications. Accuracy of the models for specific applications is validated by experimental data. Numerical codes are developed to allow implementation of the
material models for high performance computing simulations.

The highly motivated scientist or engineer with expertise in experimental mechanics will work as a part of a diverse team in our state-of-the-art laboratories. The applicant is expected to develop and apply experimental research methods in one or more of several research areas, including: material model development, failure
model development, rate-dependent material effects and advanced experimental methods/diagnostic technique development.

Introduction:

This is the Fifteenth Conference in Mechanical Engineering series that started in 1992. The conference is concerned with the latest in theoretical, mathematical and scientific developments in Mechanical Engineering as well as application of established techniques to new domains. Following tradition of conference, ISME 2007 will provide an international technical forum for experts and researches from both the academia and industry to meet and exchange new ideas and present their findings of ongoing research in various Mechanical engineering disciplines.

Although nanostructures, such as nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanowires, nanobelts, and nanometer thick films, nanostructured materials and nanocomposites have been synthesized and fabricated by various techniques, their mechanical properties have not been well explored. These nanostructures are being used as structural and functional building blocks to construct micro/nanodevices. Some nanostructured materials exhibit the breakdown of Hall-Petch behavior. The failure of conventional reinforcing models has been found in nanocomposites. The extremely small dimensions of nanomaterials and micro/nanodevices impose tremendous challenges to many existing experimental techniques and modeling tools. An in-depth understanding of mechanics at the nanoscale is greatly needed. Development of mechanical testing, and manipulation instruments and techniques, is also a technological necessity. This symposium will focus on research on mechanical properties of nanostructures, nanostructured materials and nanocomposites, and reliability testing of micro/nanodevices.

Rui Huang's post early today reminded me of writing to all of you who are going to ASME meeting in Chicago, 5-10 November 2006, a short 10 days from today.

As I wrote in September, much of the initial planning for the next year's Congress will happen at the committee meetings this year. These meetings will formulate possible topics for symposiums in the next Congress. Surely you would like to see your favorite topics get picked.

Meetings of all Technical Committees are open to all. Please find the meeting times of the Technical Committees that interest you. You may also want to know who are the Chairs of the 17 Technical Committees in the Applied Mechanics Division.

In response to a proposal by Zhigang Suo in November 2005, the Executive Committee of the Applied Mechanics Division (AMD) of ASME has created a new Technical Committee on Integrated Structures. The main purpose is to provide a home at AMD for those who are working in the interdisciplinary areas involving applied mechanics and integrated materials/structures such as microelectronics and biomedical technologies. Read more here.

To forge the link between academia and industries, the committee will be co-chaired by industrial and academic members. For the first year, Jun He of Intel and Rui Huang (myself) have served as the co-chairs. As the 2006 ASME Congress (November 5-10) coming around the corner, we would like to draw your attention to our first activities at the congress.

The Fuel Cells and Solid State Chemistry Department at Risø National Laboratory, Denmark, is seeking a postdoc to work on the fracture mechanics of solid oxide fuel cells.

The work consists of theoretical analysis, computations as well as experimental work. You will work together with the people making cells and stacks, and with the fracture mechanics group in the Materials Research Department.

I am pleased to announce that a new blolg associated with the International Journal of Fracture has been created by Springer. This is an ambitious project that aims to augment the published version of the papers and to create a dialogue between authors and readers. All articles beginning with the Dec 2004 issue now have a blog entry; ealier volumes will be added as digital processing of information continues. Discussion is not restricted to papers published in the journal, but should relate to the fracture/failure/structural integrity theme/micromechanics. Please see my post of Oct 25, 2006 for a detailed description of the obectives of the blog. I welcome your particpation in this experiment to enhance archival publication.

Dear Fellow ASME Micro & Nano Professionals :

There still is time to participate in the "Micro & Nano Society-Wide Forum" which will be held on Wednesday, November 8th, 5-8 pm, Williford Room C at the Chicago Hilton and Towers during ASME's Congress 2006.

The intention of this program is to stimulate cross-disciplinary knowledge-exchange, networking and synergy among ASME Members and other professionals interested in the development of nanotechnology. We extended the submission due date to Oct. 25th. (Previous one was a too short notice.)

A complimentary light dinner along with beverages will be provided during the program. All you need is your poster which will be tacked onto a poster board that is 96 inches by 48 inches (2.4 m by 1.2 m).

The effects of light propagation direction on the stress induced polarization dependence of silicon-based waveguide were studied. As silicon is an anisotropic material, the change of polarization dependence induced by the photoelastic effect depends on the light propagation directions. It is found that when the light propagates in <100> directions on {100} silicon, the changes of refractive index and polarization shift are about 20% more sensitive to the stress than those when the light propagates in <110> directions. (IEEE Photonic Technology Letters, vol.

Getting papers published and getting proposals granted are often great challeges for young researchers, let alone being a good reviewer. The "Ten Simple Rules" series by P.E. Bourne, L.M. Chalupa, and A. Korngreen delineate what we should follow.

• Ten simple rules for getting published
• Ten simple rules for getting grants
  
• Ten simple rules for reviewers.

More details about writing a good paper and proposal were also given by G. M. Whitesides ("writing a paper") and M.F. Ashby ("how to write a paper").

I thought I should take advantage of iMechanica and obtain feedback on some recent work that we did on nonlinear stability analysis of patterns.

A paradigmatic model that governs monolayer self-assembly was constructed a few years back by Wei Lu (Michigan) and Zhigang Suo. Apart from obtaining several physical insights they also conducted a linear stability analysis of their model. Borrowing technqiues from the nonlinear physics community, our work presents nonlinear stability analysis i.e. the initial state is no longer homogeneous and stable states beyond the transition are calculated. This allows a detailed construction of stability maps for various patterns without extensive numerical calculations.

This work is currently under review and I am attaching a pre-print with this post. Any comments and suggestions would be well-appreciated.

Open Faculty Positons:

• Computational Mechanics
• Multiscale Environmental Fluid Dynamics
• Smart Structures and Intelligent Systems

Open Faculty Position in Computational Mechanics

The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University seeks applicants for a tenure-track faculty position in the area of computational mechanics. The appointment will be commensurate with the candidate’s experience and accomplishments and can be at the assistant, associate or full professor rank, beginning August 2007. At the time of appointment, candidates must have an earned doctorate in engineering or a related field.

The SES 2007 Conference, Oct. 21-24, 2007, Texas A&M University campus in College Station, Texas, home to the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

Call for abstract

Advances in the research of the theory of Piezoelectricity and Acoustic Waves have provided essential foundation and new opportunities to device technology and have been fostering academic exchanges and interaction in the piezoelectric device industry.With the increased research activities in piezoelectricity and acoustic waves and recent fast growth in piezoelectric devices, we are also facing many technological challenges from real engineering applications and product design and manufacturing.Following the successful SPAWDA 2004 in Ningbo, Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, IEEE UFFC and the Acoustical Society of China have decided, also with industrial support, to hold the SPAWDA 2006 at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China from December 14-17.The conference topics include, but not limited to,

The Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM) at Virginia Tech seeks applications for two tenured or tenure-track faculty colleagues. The ideal candidates are expected to interface mechanics with the domain of biology (cellular mechanics, soft tissue biomechanics, macro-molecular biology, biodynamics, biofluids); the domains of nanotechnology or nanobiotechnology (mechanics of self-assembly, nanocomposites, functional nanodevices, biological and biomedical applications); or the domain of energy, with an emphasis on nanoscale and microscale problems or biological principles (fuel cells, renewable energy, energy conversion, clean energy, energy storage). However, intellectual depth is more important than the specific area of specialization, since ESM faculty members are expected to have a broad scholarly interest in engineering with a special emphasis on the fundamental mechanics.

From Robert M. McMeeking (UC Santa Barbara).

The American Academy of Mechanics calls for nominations for two awards from its members:

The 2006 American Academy of Mechanics Outstanding Service Award

Preliminary nominations should consist of a one-page letter describing the outstanding service of the nominee to the Academy as well as to the profession, along with a one-page biographical sketch of the nominee, together with the names of at least three people willing to write letters of support in the event that the Awards Committee requests them.

The 2006 American Academy of Mechanics Junior Award

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. Assistant Professorship. The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University has initiated a search seeking to fill a tenure-track faculty position at the Assistant Professor level in any of the following areas: materials, mechanics of solids, and structural engineering. For information about our current research activities, see our webpage, http://www.cee.princeton.edu/. The Department seeks outstanding candidates with clear potential for innovation and leadership in research and teaching. The Department is interested in candidates with the capacity to establish interdisciplinary collaborations with other schools and departments at Princeton. We particularly seek to build on our strong historical ties to our School of Architecture and to the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM), and to develop links with broader initiatives dealing with sustainability of the built and natural environment.

We propose a model of persistent step flow, emphasizing dominant kinetic processes and strain effects. Within this model, we construct a morphological phase diagram, delineating a regime of step flow from regimes of step bunching and island formation. In particular, we predict the existence of concurrent step bunching and island formation, a new growth mode that competes with step flow for phase space, and show that the deposition flux and temperature must be chosen within a window in order to achieve persistent step flow. The model rationalizes the diverse growth modes observed in pulsed laser deposition of SrRuO3 on SrTiO3

 Physical Review Letters 95, 095501 (2005)

hi everyone,

I'm a student at Harvard University working with Professur Zhigang Suo to develop iMechanica. I hope to add features to this website that will keep your research and ideas protected while encouraging the flow of communication and great ideas among the brightest minds in the sciences. If you have any ideas, comments, or suggestions please let me know. We hope you enjoy iMechanica.

Since I know (or was told 20 minutes ago) that some of you are interested in large area electronics and displays, I thought I would throw something out for you.

Lately, e-book readers have been a new trend in the tech industry. The potential for it is incredible: hundreds of books in the palm of your hand, digitized content distribution, and infinite number of bookmarks, searchable text, hyperlinks between books; the list goes on. However, all these benefits come at a price; namely battery life and readability.

But what kind of display should they use? The average LCD screen has about 72 dpi (dots per inch), meaning that there are 72 pixels in every inch of screen. While that's passable for regular computer usage, anyone who's tried heavy reading will tell you that it's just not clear enough. By comparison, the average newspaper has over 300 dpi, and the average book has about 400 dpi.

Dr. John Hart from MIT is giving a carbon nanotube (CNT) tutorial at the International Symposoum on Nanomanufacturing (ISNM) at MIT on November 1st, Wednesday. Please see the following if you are interested.

Carbon Nanotubes: Fundamentals, synthesis, and applications

Dr. John Hart, MIT
November 1st
9.00 am - 12.30pm (with 1 break)

http://www.isnm2006.org/Professional_courses.html

The past September marks the 100th birthday of Professor Raymond D. Mindlin. In June 2006, we organized a Mindlin Centennial Symposium in Boulder, CO, which was the largest symposium in USNCTAM'06 with more than 50 speakers.

The Symposium was very successful, and we are in particular grateful to Professor Bruno A. Boley (Mindlin's former colleague at Columbia University), who presented the opening reminiscence speech about Professor Mindlin, and to Professor Yih-Hsing Pao (Mindlin's doctoral student in 1950's), who, despite of his adverse health condition, delivered the first technical presentation entitled R. D. Mindlin and Applied Mechanics.

Snoring is defined as sounds made by vibrations in the soft palate and their adjacent tissues during sleep. Heavy snoring can result in sleep-related upper airway narrowing, which leads to respiratory flow limitation and increased respiratory effort. If untreated, heavy snoring may be complicated by excessive daytime sleepiness. Hence, snoring has received a great deal of clinical attention in recent years.

The Department of Energy is once again calling for applications to its Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) program. These fellowships cover full tuition and provide a generous stipend for up to four years, and they also provide travel support and matching funds for a computer. Undergraduate seniors or first and second year graduate students are eligible to apply.

Additional information, including an online application, is available here. Applications are due by January 10, 2007

Ninth U.S. National Congress on computational mechanics
July 22 -26, 2007. San Francisco, California

A mini-symposium on

COMPUTATIONAL METHODS FOR MICRO AND NANO SYSTEMS

Call for Papers
Micro and Nano Electro Mechanical Systems have recently attracted much attention from the industry and from the scientific community. MEMS are nowadays routinely met in various fields like in the automotive, aerospace and large consumer applications.
It can be said that for various micro systems the pioneering phase has been substituted by a phase of industrial applications. Hence, new challenges concerning reliability, optimization and increasing miniaturizations must be tackled by the designers. All these issues need a multi-disciplinary approach and must be supported by multi-physics numerical and experimental analyses able to contribute to the definition of a unified design and analysis methodology of MEMS and NEMS.