research

Thomas, M.S. Manju, K.M. Ajith, S.U. Lee and M. Asle Zaeem. Strain-induced work function in h-BN and BCN monolayers.  Physica E: Low-dimensional Systems andNanostructures 123 (2020) 114180 (9 pages).  

Abstract

EML Webinar on May 27, 2020 will be given by Prof. Norman Fleck at the University of Cambridge via Zoom meeting. Discussion leader: Vikram Deshpande, Cambridge.

Title: New Horizons in Microarchitectured Materials

Published in Extreme Mechanics Letters: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eml.2020.100685. Catastrophic failure of materials and structures due to unstable crack growth could be prevented if fracture toughness could be enhanced at will through structural design, but how can this be possible if fracture toughness is a material constant related to energy dissipation in the vicinity of a propagating crack tip.

The James Watt School of Engineering of the University of Glasgow is seeking a highly motivated graduate to undertake an exciting 3.5-year PhD project entitled, ‘multifunctional cellular composites enabled by 3D printing’. The objective of the project is to design additive manufacturing-enabled microarchitected composites with unprecedented properties optimized for location-specific structural and functional requirements for a multitude of applications. Experience and/or a strong interest in one or more of the following areas are

Hi 

I am looking for a good PhD student in the area of materials science/polymer science/computational engineering/mechanical engineering. The position is fully funded by EPSRC and ORE Catapult for 4 years.

https://www.swansea.ac.uk/postgraduate/scholarships/research/mechanical-engineering-epsrc-ore-phd-understanding.php

Dear Colleagues,

Here is the link to a recently published paper in Acta Materialia titled, "Influence of thermomechanical loads on the energetics of precipitation in magnesium aluminum alloys".

Authors: Swarnava Ghosh and Kaushik Bhattacharya

Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actamat.2020.03.007

Sincerely,

Swarnava

Designing complex architectured materials with generative adversarial networks

Yunwei Mao, Qi He, Xuanhe Zhao

The microelectronics revolution is one of the most influential drivers of current industrial developments. To probe the mechanical properties of ever shrinking materials and components, nanoindentation has come to be an omnipresent and indispensable method. In a recent combined experimental and computational approach, an international team of scientists was for the first time able to resolve the dynamic atomistic processes taking place at the elastic-plastic transition during nanoindentation.

Dear all,

An update on the http://www.legato-team.eu at work in the COVID19 response in Luxembourg. 

Check out http://www.ariana-tech.com a joint venture between Kyoto and Luxembourg. 

We study the nature of an environment-induced exceptional point in a non-Hermitian pair of coupled mechanical oscillators. The mechanical oscillators are a pair of pillars carved out of a single isotropic elastodynamic medium made of aluminum and consist of carefully controlled differential losses. The interoscillator coupling originates exclusively from background modes associated with the “environment,” that portion of the structure which, if perfectly rigid, would support the oscillators without coupling.

Achieving high damping and stiffness is challenging in common materials because of their inter-dependent scaling. Controlling extreme mechanical waves requires synergistically enhanced damping and stiffness. We demonstrate superior damping and stiffness in vertically aligned carbon nanotube (VACNT) foams that are also independently controllable by exploiting their synthesis-tailored structural hierarchy and structural gradients. They exhibit frequency- and amplitude-dependent responses with dramatically tunable dynamic stiffness while maintaining constant damping.

Distinct deformation mechanisms that emerge in nanoscale enable the nanostructured materials to exhibit outstanding specific mechanical properties. Here, we present superior microstructure- and strain-rate-dependent specific penetration energy (up to ∼3.8 MJ/kg) in semicrystalline poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-trifluoroethylene) (P(VDF-TrFE)) thin films subjected to high-velocity (100 m/s to 1 km/s) microprojectile (diameter: 9.2 μm) impacts.

EML Webinar on May 13, 2020 will be given by Prof. Katia Bertoldi at Harvard University via Zoom meeting. 

We present a singularity free formulation and its efficient numerical implementation for the spatial deformation of Kirchhoff rods having uniformly distributed electrostatic charge. Due to the presence of continuously distributed charge, the governing equations of the Kirchhoff rod become a system of integro-differential equations which is singular at every arc-length. We show that this singularity is of removable type which, ones removed, makes the system well defined everywhere. No cutoff length or mollifier is used to remove this singularity.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmps.2020.104017

Abstract

The full paper can be found at:

https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1b2plc7qwXwm0

Abstract:

Geometric incompatibilities are ubiquitous in natural structures and are recently being exploited in synthetic

structures to enhance the performance of soft systems. In this work we focus on infinitely long bi-layer

Dexin Zhao , Kelvin Xie 

Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.

Abstract

The full video of a recent symposium organized by the Young Academy of Europe on Covid-19 epidemiology is now online on YouTube, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy1qVBs6fHI

EML Webinar on May 6, 2020 will be given by Prof. Xuanhe Zhao at MIT via Zoom meeting. 

Title: Extreme Mechanics of Soft Materials for Merging Human-Machine Intelligence

Self-excited vibrations represent a big concern in engineering, particularly in automotive, railway and aeronautic industry. Many lumped models have been proposed over the years to analyze the stability of such systems. Among the instability mechanisms a falling characteristic of the friction law and mode coupling have been shown to give friction-excited oscillations. The mass-on-moving-belt system has been studied extensively in Literature, very often adopting a prescribed form of the friction law and linearizing the contact stiffness.

Dear iMechanica,

We are very excited to share the news that our recent work on bioinspired materials with self‐adaptable mechanical properties is published in Advanced Materials.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.201906970

The work was done in collaboration with Prof. Kang from Johns Hopkins University