research

Dear Mechanicians,

a new project at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca (Lucca, Italy) has just been launched to create the first open access database of rough surfaces from nature and technology, see: 

http://musam.imtlucca.it/wikisurf.html

People are invited to contribute to the database by providing images of surfaces acquired using experimental techniques, as well as the corresponding elevation data field (raw x,y,z data in columns).

This study investigates the influence of physical aging on the deformation behaviors of poly(ethylene terephthalate)-glycol. The polymers are subjected to a quenched and an annealed heat treatment, followed by deformation in tension. The digital image correlation (DIC) is used to capture the surface strain. The DIC results show that the deformation localization occurs in the post-yield strain softening region. The quenched and annealed polymers exhibit different localization types, representing as necking for quenched polymers and shear banding for annealed polymers.

Icephobic Materials

Yizhi Zhuo, Jianying He

NTNU Nanomechanical Lab, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

https://doi.org/10.1088/1402-4896/aab4e2 In the 50 years that succeeded Richard Feynman’s exposition of the idea that there is "plenty of room at the bottom" for manipulating individual atoms for the synthesis and manufacturing processing of materials, the materials-by-design paradigm is being developed gradually through synergistic integration of experimental material synthesis and characterization with predictive computational modeling and optimization.

Biomechanics & Biomechanical Testing

Full blog post can be found here. 

Key concepts for medical device design include biomechanics, biocompatibility, and biofunctionality. This post will go over the mechanics of an exemplar biological tissue, the bone, and mechanical testing of biomaterials that are used in developing medical devices and equipment.

Kunhao Yu, Nicholas X. Fang, Guoliang Huang, Qiming Wang, Magnetoactive Acoustic Metamaterials, Advanced Materials, 1706348, 2018.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.desal.2018.03.029 In parallel with recent developments in carbon nanomaterials, there is growing interest in using these nanomaterials for desalination. To date, many studies have affirmed the potential of using such nanomaterials for constant pressure desalination operation. In this work, the performance of such membrane when subjected to oscillatory pressure at sub-nanosecond is investigated in detail.