research

Wanliang Shan

Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Syracuse University

Introduction

The Extreme Mechanics Letters (EML) Young Investigator Award (YIA) 2024 edition is organized by the journal and Elsevier to honor the best paper by a young scientist. The papers must have been published in volumes 63-69, from 2023 to 2024.

The contact between a rigid Hertzian indenter and an adhesive broad-band viscoelastic substrate is considered. The material behavior is described by a modified power law model, which is characterized by only four parameters, the glassy and rubbery elastic moduli, a characteristic exponent n and a timescale tau0.

In differential geometry, rigidity theory investigates whether a surface can deform by pure bending without stretching. The central problem is to find or disprove the existence of isometric deformations.

Classical examples in the "discrete" category include:

by Oscar Lopez-Pamies, John E. Dolbow, Gilles A. Francfort, and Chris J. Larsen

Abstract

Our latest paper is accessible freely for 50 days from this link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1jiSx7NHxQiuj

Dear colleagues,

We invite you to see the preprint of our new paper Lagrangian approach to origami vertex analysis: Kinematics that will appear in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. Here we show how the Lagrangian approach to origami facilitates the exploitation of symmetry, formulate reduced order compatibility conditions for some symmetric foldings, and obtain analytical expressions for the kinematics of some degree 6 and degree 8 origami vertices.

In this work, we show that the combination of material quenched disorder (of finite strength/amplitude and correlation length) and a 2D tip-splitting instability (that gives rise to extra fracture surfaces) is at the heart of the spatiotemporal dynamics of cracks in 3D. Specifically, it is shown to account for the widely observed limiting (terminal) velocity of cracks, mirror-mist-hackle sequence of morphological transitions, crack macro-branching and a 3D-to-2D transition, out-of-plane crack front waves and the properties of micro-branches.  

https://www.sciengine.com/AMS/doi/10.1007/s10409-024-24010-x

Our analysis based on a simple model shows how adhesive friction breaks the size limit dictated by the fracture theory, which can offer insights into understanding the phenomena associated with adhesive friction in various fields, including gecko adhesion, cell adhesion, earthquake, etc.

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.05283

With funding from the Haythornthwaite Foundation, the Executive Committee (EC) of the Applied Mechanics Division (AMD) of ASME is pleased to announce the establishment of the Haythornthwaite Research Initiation Grant Program, targeting university faculty engaged in research in theoretical and applied mechanics that are at the beginning of their academic careers.

Dear Colleagues,

We wanted to alert you for the call for nominations of the awards of the Applied Mechanics Division (AMD) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), which are due on September 15th, 2024.

The International Centre for Mechanical Sciences (CISM), based in Udine (Italy), has opened a call for applications to allow small groups of researchers in mechanics, two to four coming from different institutions, to spend two to four weeks at CISM during the year 2025 to start or to complete a joint research project.

Applicants should hold a PhD on a subject related to Mechanics, and there are no restrictions on their academic seniority.

Many researchers and engineers view mechanical fatigue of metals as a stagnated field, evidenced by the lack of substantially novel design approaches against fatigue in recent decades. However, our current capability to investigate, probe, and model the multiscale mechanisms of fatigue damaging processes may turn out to be pivotal for next-generation paradigms for the assessment of fatigue.

I am happy to share our newest open access article which is just published in Scripta Materialia. For the first time, the mechanism of domain nucleation during ferroelastic domain switching is revealed by utilizing phase-field simulations.

For a given material, \emph{controllable deformations} are those deformations that can be maintained in the absence of body forces and by applying only boundary tractions. For a given class of materials, \emph{universal deformations} are those deformations that are controllable for any material within the class.

Dear friend

FABER networking project is funded for next four years by the COST Association. Its goal is to solve the current deadlock in validating the metal fatigue life evaluation methods and solvers by establishing benchmark sets of curated experimental fatigue data, with the focus set on the high-cycle fatigue category above all.

We have developed a mechanical transistor that synergizes a Kirigami thermomechanical sensor and a bistable actuator, enabling in-memory computing for combinational and sequential logic.

Our mechanical computing device stands out by employing modular construction, symmetry breaking, nonlinear materials, crafting logic gates and memory units responding to environmental stimuli through thermal delay.

I am happy to share our newest open access article which is published in Computational Materials Science. For the first time, we were able to create the t’ phase of yttria stabilized zirconia from its cubic phase through the process of rapid quenching by utilizing molecular dynamics simulations. The simulation of quenching process followed the experimental procedure, and the results of virtual XRD and RDF were comparable to the actual experiments, verifying the created phases.

We are happy to announce the next cycle of bi-annual ICME  (Integrated Computational Materials Engineering)  award established by the AIAA ICME Working Group with the support of Composite Design and Manufacturing HUB (cdmHUB), NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), and Rolls Royce Corporation. This recognition includes recognition at SciTech 2026 conference and a $1,500.00 team award.

Hello,

We are looking for a doctoral student to work on wave-ice interaction. The emphasis in this research is on experiments in the 40m x 40m Aalto Ice and Wave Tank with a novel wave-maker, and our interest extends to ship-wave-ice interaction. The position is fully funded for four years and may include also field work.