Adrian Podpirka's blog

I was working on the problem set for and on question 16 and 17 refers to a paper by Charalmbides, Lund, Evans and McMeeking entitled 

"A Test Specimen for Determining the Fracture Resistance of Bimaterial Interfaces." (1989)

I am pretty new to having a class that is fully powerpoint presentations and am wondering how everyone else is coping with it. Does anyone have any pointers or useful ways they keep notes in powerpoint classes? Printing the notes before hand? Anotating directly on the notes? Having a seperate notebook for notes and seperate handouts of presentation, etc etc?

My name is Adrian Podpirka and I am a first year graduate student at Harvard studying Applied Physics. My undergraduate major was material science and engineering at Columbia University. Before taking fracture mechanics this semester I have taken Solid Mechanis (ES 240) with professor Suo.

After reading the abstract on the resonanting cantilever mass detector, I think this paper might be of interest to some.  My colleagues and I wrote this for a MEMS device class we took Fall 2005 at Columbia University while I was an undergraduate.  It was a term design project.

Abstract – Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) often provide cost effective 

In this project, I will attempt to analyze the stresses and vibrations produced by a stroke of a golfer on the club in order to determine the drivers “sweet spot.”  The sweet spot is the spot on the clubface, which causes the lease amount of vibration and force transfer to the golfers hand thus giving the golfer the best energy transfer, feel and therefore, the best drive. (Cross, The Sweet Spot of a baseball bat)   Anyone who plays golf can quickly approximate the location of the sweet spot so I will attempt to verify its location through finite element analysis.

So besides using Timoshenko (which is basically the bible of solid mechanics), I have been using Slaughter's The Linearized Theory of Elasticity which I came across in the Gordon McKay Library.

Unlike some of the other textbooks, there is a big focus put on the theory and the idea behind the examples while still having many worked out problems. The first few chapters give a big refresher course on mathematics and lay the groundwork for what is to be taught later on.

I came across this book in particular for the in depth coverage of Airy Stress Functions.

The book is broken into 11 chapters:

Review of Mechanics of Materials
Mathematical Preliminaries
Kinematics
Forces and Stress
Constitutive Equations
Linearized Elasticity Problems
2D Problems
Torsion of Noncircular Cylinders
3D Problems
Variational Methods
Complex Variable Methods

My name is Adrian Podpirka and I am a first year grad student studying applied physics. I came to Harvard after finishing my Bachelors in Material Science and Engineering at Columbia University. As an undergraduate I took Mechanics of Solids with Professor Xi Chen and Mechanical Properties of Materials with Professor Noyan.

Related to this course, my main weakness is the mathematics involved since it has been more then 3 years since I took differential equations. Also, both my undergraduate courses were not tensor based. My main strength in this course would be my understanding of material properties and the phenomenas involved.

My likely research direction will probably be in the field of fuel cell membranes with Professor Ramanathan.