Dear Colleagues:

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for the 2012 ASME
IMECE in Houston, to be held November 9-15, 2012.  Our minisymposium
is on "Multiphysics Simulations and Experiments for Solids", and is the
continuation of a very successful minisymposium held for the past 5 years
that have resulted in more than 40 presentations at the 2009, 2010 and 2011 IMECE conferences.  This year's focus areas
are:

1.Multiphysics modeling, simulation and experiments of electromechanical materials and systems

2.Multiphysics modeling, simulation  and experiments of optomechanical materials and systems

The objective of this paper is to examine the instability characteristics of both a bulk FCC crystal  and a (100) surface of an FCC crystal under uniaxial stretching along a <100> direction using an atomistic-based nonlocal instability criterion.  By comparison to benchmark atomistic simulations, we demonstrate that for both the FCC bulk and (100) surface, about 5000-10000 atoms are required in order to obtain an accurate converged value for the instability strain and a converged instability mode.  The instability modes are fundamentally different at the surface as compared to the bulk, but in both cases a strong dependence of the instability mode on the number of atoms that are allowed to participate in the instability process is observed.  In addition, the nonlo

Dear Colleagues:

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for the upcoming
2011 Annual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Sciences
(SES 2011), to be held October 12-14, 2011, at Northwestern University
in Evanston, Illinois (http://ses2011.org/). 
The area of the minisymposium is "Mechanics of Crystalline and
Composite Nanostructures", and we anticipate having a diverse and
well-respected group of theoreticians and experimentalists give
presentations on this subject.  Abstracts can be submitted by going to
the following conference website:

Dear Colleagues:

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for the 2011 ASME
IMECE in Denver, to be held November 11-17, 2011.  Our minisymposium
is on "Multiphysics Simulations for Solids", and is the
continuation of a very successful minisymposium held for the past 4 years
that have resulted in more than 50 presentations at the 2009 and 2010 IMECE conferences.  This year's focus areas
are:

1.Multiphysics modeling, simulation and experiments of electromechanical materials and systems

2.Multiphysics modeling, simulation  and experiments of optomechanical materials and systems

Dear Colleagues:

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for the upcoming 2011 Annual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Sciences (SES 2011), to be held October 12-14, 2011, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (http://ses2011.org/).  The area of the minisymposium is "Mechanics of Crystalline and Composite Nanostructures", and we anticipate having a diverse and well-respected group of theoreticians and experimentalists give presentations on this subject.  Abstracts can be submitted by going to the following conference website:

http://ses2011.org/submit_abstracts.php

where our minisymposium is labeled 3.1.  We look forward to seeing you at Northwestern in the fall of 2011!

Dear Colleagues:

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for the 2011 ASME
IMECE in Denver, to be held November 11-17, 2011.  Our minisymposium
is on "Multiphysics Simulations for Solids", and is the
continuation of a very successful minisymposium held for the past 4 years
that have resulted in more than 50 presentations at the 2009 and 2010 IMECE conferences.  This year's focus areas
are:

1.Multiphysics modeling, simulation and experiments of electromechanical materials and systems

2.Multiphysics modeling, simulation  and experiments of optomechanical materials and systems

3.Multiphysics modeling, simulation and experiments of biomechanical materials and systems

The computational nanomechanics laboratory (http://people.bu.edu/parkhs/), which is based at Boston University under the direction of Prof. Harold Park, is looking to recruit a highly motivated and independent postdoctoral researcher to study, via the development of new computational methodologies, various scientific issues surrounding the mechanics of crystalline nanostructures.  The position is available for a 1-year duration, with possible extension to future years depending on the availability of funding.  

Requirements for the postdoc position include:

1.  A strong background in computational solid mechanics, programming and implemeneting finite element-based methodologies

Dear Colleagues:

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for the 2010 ASME IMECE in Vancouver, to be held November 12-18, 2010.  Our minisymposium is on "Multiphysics Simulations and Experiments for Solids", and is the continuation of a very successful minisymposium held at the 2009 IMECE that resulted in more than 50 presentations.  This year's focus areas are:

The Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado
at Boulder invites applications for two full-time positions beginning
fall 2010. The positions are for tenure-track assistant professors with
disciplinary expertise in the areas of (1) Bioengineering (posting #808181), and (2) Solid Mechanics/Materials Physics (posting #808182);
higher rank may be considered for experienced candidates. Candidates
are expected to strongly complement and strengthen existing
departmental research in biomechanical/biomaterials engineering, energy
and environmental engineering, micro/nanosystems engineering, materials
engineering or solid/fluid mechanics. Candidates must have an earned

Horacio Espinosa and I welcome the submission of new abstracts for a minisymposium on "Mechanics of Crystalline Nanostructures", to be held at the 2010 US National Congress on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (USNCTAM 2010), June 27-July 2 at Penn State University. 

I would like to invite everyone attending the 2008 ASME IMECE next week in Boston to attend a keynote lecture given by Prof. Ted Belytschko of Northwestern University.  The lecture will occur at 1:45 PM on Tuesday, November 4, and will be entitled "Multiscale Computations of Fracture - When Does Flaw Tolerance Occur?" 

Further information on Prof. Belytschko's talk can be found here: 

http://www.asmeconferences.org/Congress08/PlenarySessions.cfm

There has recently been a great deal of discussion on imechanica regarding the effects of surface stress on the resonant properties of nanostructures such as nanowires.  The controversy has revolved around the strain-independent part of the surface stress, which can be shown, i.e. by Gurtin et al. APL 1976, 529-530, or by Lu et al, PRB 2005, 085405, to have no effect on the resonant frequency of the nanobeam.  The reason is because in taking the moment, and differentiating the moment to get the beam equation of motion, the strain-independent part of the surface stress drops out as it is constant, while the strain-dependent (surface elastic) part survives the differentiation.

Abstract of paper recently accepted for publication in Journal of Applied Physics:

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. The critical impact of this is that standard continuum relations, which do not account for size-dependence or the discrete nature of atomistic surfaces, are no longer valid at the nanometer length scale.  

Hello All:

I'm interested in learning more about material instability, for example the localization criterions of Hill (1962) and Rudnicki and Rice (1975).  I also am aware of work by Rice (1976), in which a perturbation is made to the displacement field in the form of a plane harmonic wave, resulting in a strong ellipticity instability condition that looks like Det(Q), where Q = c_ijkl + Sigma_jk, i.e. a competition between material softening and stress increase determines the instability.  Furthermore, this stability criterion is developed assuming an infinite body.

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

We present a surface Cauchy-Born approach to modeling FCC metals with nanometer scale dimensions for which surface stresses contribute significantly to the overall mechanical response. The model is based on an extension of the traditional Cauchy-Born theory in which a surface energy term that is obtained from the underlying crystal structure and governing interatomic potential is used to augment the bulk energy.