research

The Center for Cellular Mechanics at U of Illinois has recently hosted a week long summer workshop on Cell Mechano Sensitivity (July 30-Aug 3, 2007. The workshop had lectures in the morning an hands on-labs in the aternoons. All the lectures are on the web (with slides and video). They include a large collection of references. The web also has the laboratory protocols for cell culture, cell fixing and staining, single molecule detection, florescence microscopy, and much more. Visit the website:

www.ccm.uiuc.edu  

I am looking at problems of large deformation and large elastic strain in biological materials, using an analytical model that determines the current deformed state in a single step from the original undeformed state. The approach is to propose a strain energy function to allow the calculation of Piola-Kirchhoff 2 stresses which may then be converted to true Cauchy stresses via the usual mapping. Since I initially calculate PK2 stresses, the strain energy function must be a function of Green strain.

abstract:

Nanoscale materials, including thin films, quantum dots, nanowires, nanobelts, etc – are all structurally unique because they have a relatively high ratio of surface area to volume ratio.  This increase in surface area to volume ratio is important for nanomaterials because wide and unexpected variations in mechanical and other physical properties, such as thermal, electrical and optical, have been found to scale in some proportion to increase in surface area to volume ratio.

PRL 99, 175503 (2007);   Jianyu Huang, Feng Ding, Kun Jiao, Boris I Yakobson

Youtube Movie:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSNlE8AreeM    http://www.nature.com/nnano/reshigh/2007/1107/full/nnano.2007.404.html