research

When I was a graduate student, I spent several months to measure interfacial toughness between metalic (Cu and Au) films and thick substrates(Si and Polycarbonate). My methods were bulge test (blistering test) and 4-point bending test. I had many problems such as making an initial crack(pre-cracking), changing load phase angle applied to specimens, preparing/patterning thin films, constructing my own test apparatus, etc. The biggest problem was to measure the interfacial toughness over a wide range of loading phase angle. For a bimaterial with a non-zero oscillatory index(epsilon), we don't know the phase angle for a minimum interfacial toughness beforehand. Therefore, we need to measure the interfacial toughness over a wide range of phage angle. For engineering purpose, we need a minimum interfacial toughness value for reliability design because this value will lead to a conservative design of systems.

Given link is for a stochastic micromechanical model developed for predicting probabilistic characteristics of elastic mechanical properties of an isotropic functionally graded material (FGM) subject to statistical uncertainties in material properties of constituents and their respective volume fractions.

Last year I spent three months modeling the compressive behavior of aluminum alloy foams. I had hoped to find some evidence of the banding instability that is often observed in elastomeric foams [1]. Lakes writes that this sort of banding instability provides indirect experimental evidence for negative shear modulus [2].

I wanted to share some our work on the deformation behavior of metal nanowires that was recently published in Advanced Functional Materials. In this work, we considered the tensile deformation of three experimentally observed silver nanowire geometries, including five-fold twinned, pentagonal nanowires. The manuscript abstract and urls to videos of the tensile deformation of the three nanowire geometries are below. A copy of the manuscript is attached.

Abstract. This letter addresses the dependence of homogeneous dislocation nucleation on the crystallographic orientation of pure copper under uniaxial tension and compression.  Molecular dynamics simulation results with an embedded-atom method potential show that the stress required for homogeneous dislocation nucleation is highly dependent on the crystallographic orientation and the uniaxial loading conditions; certain orientations require a higher stress in compression (e.g., <110> and <111>) and other orientations require a higher stress in tension (<100>).  Furthermore, the resolved shear stress in the slip direction is unable to completely capture the dependence of homogeneous dislocation nucleation on crystal orientation and uniaxial loading conditions.

Might also be useful for simulating dislocation motion in a finite body.

Several sets of boundary integral equations for two dimensional elasticity are derived from Cauchy integral theorem.These equations reveal the relations between displacements and resultant forces, between displacements and tractions, and between the tangential derivatives of displacements and tractions on solid boundary.Special attention is given to the formulation that is based on tractions and the tangential derivatives of displacements on boundary, because its integral kernels have the weakest singularities.The formulation is further extended to include singular points, such as dislocations and line forces, in a finite body, so that the singular stress field can be directly obtained from solving the integral equations on the external boundary without involving the linear superposition technique often used in the literature. Body forces and thermal effect are subsequently included. The general framework of setting up a boundary value problem is discussed and continuity conditions at a non-singular corner are derived.  The general procedure in obtaining the elastic field around a circular hole is described, and the stress fields with first and second order singularities are obtained. Some other analytical solutions are also derived by using the formulation. 

In the brief presentation attached, I am summarizing my lab's recent work in the field of adhesion and work-of-adhesion measurements, and hoping to see who else is working in the field.  Here is some intro to the topic (by no means, it is complete - maybe we can add some recent work to this list as discussions develop)

By Martijn Feron, Zhen Zhang and Zhigang Suo

The mobility of charge carriers in silicon can be significantly increased when silicon is subject to a field of strain.In a microelectronic device, however, the strain field may be intensified at a sharp feature, such as an edge or a corner, injecting dislocations into silicon and ultimately failing the device. The strain field at an edge is singular, and is often a linear superposition of two modes of different exponents. We characterize the relative contribution of the two modes by a mode angle, and determine the critical slip systems as the amplitude of the load increases. We calculate the critical residual stress in a thin-film stripe bonded on a silicon substrate.

If you are interested in nano-calorimetry or combinatorial analysis, you might also find the following paper interesting. It was published as part of the MRS spring ‘06 meeting proceedings (http://www.mrs.org/s_mrs/sec_subscribe.asp?CID=6447&DID=175796&action=de...). This paper describes the parallel nano-differential scanning calorimeter (PnDSC), a new device for measuring the thermal properties of nano-scale material systems using a combinatorial approach.

For many mechanicians and materials scientists one of the most confounding things (in the ever increasing literature on carbon nanotubes) is the reported theoretical value of the nanotube elastic modulus. Depending upon the specific paper at hand, the reported numerical values range from 1 -6 TPa!

In continuum mechanics, it is a common practice to view a body as a field of material particles, so that the continuum mechanics is phrased as an algorithm to determine the function x(X, t), where X is the name of a particle, and x is the place of the particle at time t.

We present atomistic simulations of the tensile and compressive loading of single crystal FCC nanowires with <100> and <110> orientations to study the propensity of the nanowires to deform via twinning or slip.  By studying the deformation characteristics of three FCC materials with disparate stacking fault energies (gold, copper and nickel), we find that the deformation mechanisms in

A subdomain collocation method based on Voronoi diagrams and reproducing kernel approximation is presented. The unkonwn field variables are approximated via reproducing kernel approximation. The body integration arising from the numerical evaluation of Galerkin weak form is converted into much cheaper contour integration along the boundary of each Voronoi cell. The Voronoi cells also provide an natural structure to perform h-adaptivity.