Journal Club Forum

Welcome to the forum! Discussion topics were suggested initially as follow:

Metal foams, cell deformation (bending, buckling, plasticity and fracture), constitutive stress-strain behaviour of cellular materials, energy absorption, hypervelocity impact, shock wave behaviour, 1D shock modelling, shock attenuation, shock enhancement, Material Point Method (MPM) simulation and microscopic tomography experimental observation;

and later were extended to many related:

Discontinuities have a fundamental role in the mechanics of solids. The most famous type of discontinuity is a crack, but others are important too, such as dislocations and phase boundaries. Many types of deformation that appear to be continuous at the macroscale, such as plastic flow in metals, really involve the evolution of discontinuities at some smaller scale. 

Welcome to the February 2009 issue. In this issue, we will discuss the use of finite elements (FEs) in quantum mechanics, with specific focus on the quantum-mechanical problem that arises in crystalline solids. We will consider the electronic structure theory based on the Kohn-Sham equations of density functional theory (KS-DFT): in real-space, Schrödinger and Poisson equations are solved in a parallelepiped unit cell with Bloch-periodic and periodic boundary conditions, respectively.

Welcome to the January 2009 issue. This issue addresses the important discussion on cell mechanics. Acute need to study cell mechanics is driven by the fundamental goal of tissue engineering i.e. to make tissue engineered constructs that can mimic the environment for tissue regeneration with a potential to replace the biological functions of damaged organs. There is now worldwide activity in the in vitro regeneration of tissues including nerve, liver, bone, heart valves, blood vessels, and kidney.

The key to developing materials against failure under extreme environments is the understanding of the interplay between the various physical scales present, from the atomic level interactions, to the microstructural composition and the macroscale behavior. The ability to do this requires new methods that can be used to predict macroscale properties accurately based on microstructures and nanostructures without resorting to empiricism.

Starting with a solid mechanics background, I have been recently interested in fluid-structure interactions for applications in biomechanics of soft-tissues; and thought that the iMechanica Journal Club forum would be a good opportunity to share my personal experience and start a discussion on this challenging inter-disciplinary subject.