research

Dear all,

         I am new to X-FEM, started reading papers a couple of weeks before. I understood, functions[heaviside,sign..] are used to enrich the nodes to simulate virtually the discontinuity and asymptotic functions are used to charecterize the crack tip,other than this regular FEM nodes are there. I have few questions. 

recommend more references about this topic: S. van der Zwaag Editor, Self Healing Materials-An Alternative Approach to 20 Centuries of Materials Science. Springer, 2007.  about half of this book talk self healing polymers.

I am a third yr undergraduate student of Aerospace Engineering department, IIT Kharagpur. I have a very simple question in strucutral mechanics. Is there any analytical solution available for deflection of plate under distributed load? The governing equation is well known and has been attached as an image file. Only classical plate theory can be considered. The boundary conditions can be taken as classical boundary conditions. So that can be any combination of a) hinged b) clamped and c) free boundary conditions.

We recently find that podosomes, very dynamic, self-organized structures, can function as mechanosensors.  For details, see the recent issue of Current Biology.

Metallic glass in bulk form is known to have superb strength and elastic response but very limited plastic deformation ability. Through machining the metaillinc glass into submicometer pillars, experiment found that metallic glass can actually sustain very large plastic doformation (see attached Figure).  The detail of this finding can be found in our most recent publication: Z. W. Shan et al, Plastic flow and failure resistance of metallic glass: Insight from in situ compression of nanopillars, Phys. Rev.