Daniel Hurtado, from the California Institute of Technology, is the 2011 Melosh Medalist for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis.  Daniel won for his paper titled "Multiscale Modeling of Microcrystalline Materials".  He presented the paper on Friday, April 29, 2011, on the campus of Duke University.  

Please join me in congratulating Daniel!

Six finalists have been announced for the Twenty-Third Annual Robert J. Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis. The finalists and their current institutions are:

Bircan Avci, Leibniz University

Andrea Hawkins-Daarud, University of Texas at Austin

Daniel Hurtado, California Institute of Technology

This is the second call for abstracts for the 23nd Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper on Finite Element Analysis.  The deadline for the abstracts has been extended to January 14, 2011.   Details of the competition and submission procedure can be found here. 

The 23nd Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper on Finite Element Analysis will be held at Duke University on April 29, 2011.  The competition has become one of the premier graduate student events in the broad area of mechanics. 

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position in the area of materials, structures, and geosystems. The search is open to all candidates regardless of rank.  We are particularly interested in scholars with excellent research and teaching experience who will complement one or more of the department's ongoing initiatives in computational mechanics, geomechanical modeling and characterization, or dynamics and control.Additional information about the faculty and research initiatives in these areas is provided at http://www.cee.duke.edu/civil/materials-structures-geosystems.

A postdoctoral fellowship is available in the Duke Computational Mechanics Laboratory, beginning in September of 2010 (with flexibility on timing).  Funding for the fellowship concerns research in the simulation of dynamic fracture of polycarbonate.  The ideal candidate will have experience in some combination of the following areas (in no particular order of importance):

Phanish Suryanarayana, from the California Institute of Technology, is the 2010 Melosh Medalist for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis.  Phanish won for his paper titled "Non-periodic Finite-Element and Mesh-Free Formulation of Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory".  He presented the paper on Friday, April 30, 2010, on the campus of Duke University.  

Please join me in congratulating Phanish!  

Seven finalists and three honorable mentions have been announced for the Twenty-Second Annual Robert J. Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis. The seven finalists and their current institutions are:

Marcial Gonzalez, Caltech

Ming-Chen Hsu, University of California San Diego

Alejandro Ortiz, University of California Davis

Jay Oswald, Northwestern University

Rashmi Raghu, Stanford University

Phanish Suryanarayana, Caltech

Kris van der Zee, University of Texas at Austin

The three honorable mentions and their institutions are:

Pritam Chakraborty, Ohio State University

This is the second call for abstracts for the 22nd Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper on Finite Element Analysis.  Extended abstracts are due by January 8, 2010.   Details of the competition and submission procedure can be found here. 

The 22nd Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper on Finite Element Analysis will be held at Duke University on April 30, 2010.  The competition has become one of the premier graduate student events in the broad area of mechanics. 

Attention all iMechanicians!  If you have a theme you would like to see in the Journal Club next year, please feel free to:

1. post it here for discussion
2. send it to me via email
3. reccommend discussion leaders

Thanks in advance!

This has been a topic that the editors of Journal Club have been discussing for some time now.  We would like some feedback from the entire iMechanica community.

iMechanica's Journal Club was originally proposed by Pradeep Sharma to be an online analog to a standard "Journal Club" that many research groups hold.  The basic idea is simple enough: a set of articles are identified by the group, everyone reads them, and then there's a discussion. In theory, there are many advantages to mimicking this process online and specifically at iMechanica.  These include experts leading the discussion, the discussion being saved online so that anyone can see it, and the use of different types of media.

A postdoctoral fellowship is available in the Duke Computational Mechanics Laboratory, beginning in September of 2009 (with flexibility on timing).  Funding for the fellowship concerns research in the simulation of large-scale fragmentation phenomena.  The ideal candidate will have experience in some combination of the following areas:

Researchers at Duke University are seeking applications for NRC research associates, to work with Professors David Stepp and John Dolbow.  The NRC program is unique in the sense that applicants have the opportunity to perform research on a program they design.  The positions are well-paid fellowships and are nominally for two years, extendable to a third.  

We are seeking applicants who are generally interested in examining the intrinsic relationships between the structure of polymeric and biological materials and their mechanical and/or optical properties, as influenced by composition, processing, environment, and applied stimulus.  Researchers with a strong computational or experimental background are particularly encouraged to apply.  

Last fall, Elsevier launched SciTopics. It is a web site devoted to providing research summaries of current topics by experts, allowing for public interaction through comments.  Anyone can become a member and post comments, or request to author a page. 

The deadline for abstracts for the 21st Annual Melosh Competition has been extended until January 30.  All interested graduate students are encouraged to apply.

 This competition for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis will be held at Duke University on Friday, April 24, 2009.  The competition has become one of the premier graduate student events in the broad area of computational mechanics.  

On Friday, April 25th, 2008, the 20th Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis was held at Duke University.  The competition resulted in a tie between Ludovic Chamoin (of the University of Texas, Austin) and Irina Kalashnikova (of Stanford University).   Here is a picture of the 2008 Melosh Medalists with the judges, Leo Franca and Nicolas Moes:

 From L to R: Leo Franca, Ludovic Chamoin, Irina Kalashnikova, Nicolas Moes.  

Six finalists for the 20th Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis have been announced.  They are:

Ludovic Chamoin, University of Texas at Austin

Irina Kalashnikova, Stanford University

Christian Linder, University of California, Berkeley

Ajaykumar Rajasekharan, Stanford University

Saurabh Srivastava, SUNY Buffalo

Tim Wildey, University of Texas at Austin 

All six finalists will compete in the second phase of the Competition, the Melosh Symposium, to be held at Duke University on Friday, April 25, 2008.

The 20th Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper on Finite Element Analysis will be held at Duke University on April 25, 2008.  The competition has become one of the premier graduate student events in the broad area of mechanics.   We have held the competition at a variety of locations over the past several years, and this year we are returning to Durham.   

As a moderator here on iMechanica, I have deleted a few posts recently that were clearly spam. As iMechanica grows and becomes more visible within the mechanics community and the broader internet community, we can expect the frequency of these kinds of posts to increase.

I think we might also expect to see posts turn from a spirited intellectual exchange to one that is personal. What should the moderators do in this instance? What is the appropriate response? Should we ban members that do this repeatedly? Are there other types of behavior that are deemed unacceptable here?

The 19th Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis was held last Friday, April 27, at ETH Zurich. Two medalists were selected this year from the six finalists. The 2007 Melosh Medalists are Vikram Gavini, from Caltech, and Michael Hain, from Leibniz University, Hannover.

I taught a short course some time ago on the eXtended Finite Element Method, and thought many people would find the notes useful.  

So I've posted them here, in .mov format (as exported with the Apple software keynote).  The advantage of this format is that, when you click on one of the .mov files, it should open a separate browser.  Clicking in the window will advance the slide. This way you see all the movies, etc, as well as the sequence as it appears when I gave the talk.  There is a way to add audio to this format as well - something I may pursue in the future.  

The six finalists for the 19th Annual Robert J. Melosh Medal Competition for the Best Student Paper in Finite Element Analysis were announced last Friday. They are

Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Cornell University

These used to be hosted at Northwestern, but the files were taken down some time ago. The original 1d and 2d Matlab routines for the element-free Galerkin method are now located at

http://www.duke.edu/~jdolbow/EFG/programs.html

These routines are described in detail in the paper

J. Dolbow and T. Belytschko (1998), "An Introduction to Programming the Meshless Element Free Galerkin Method," Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 207--242.

I've been a Mac person ever since they started basing their operating systems on what is essentially a Linux kernel.

One of the frustrating things, however, concerned the lack of OpenGL support. With the recent update to X11 by Apple, this is fixed. However, in order to use it remotely, from the X11 terminal, one has to use the option

%ssh -Y login_name@remotehost

as opposed to the previously used

%ssh -X login_name@remotehost

This is a pretty obscure change, and has not been well-documented by Apple.