Discover the NANOMOTION World as an Early Stage Researcher (PhD student) in an EU-wide program on “Nanoelectromechanical Motion in Functional Materials (NANOMOTION)”!

The individual project:

“Finite-element modelling of electromechanically coupled materials”

will be hosted at University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany), www.uni-due.de/mechanika, with secondment to the University College Dublin (Ireland).

Constitutive relations, 2-D vs. 3-D. The starting point for modeling cellular membranes is the constitutive relations in 2-D space. It is important to set up the corresponding equations directly in two dimensions rather than to consider them as an asymptotic limit of three-dimensional relationships, like it is done in the shell theory. The main reason for the direct 2-D relations is that 3-D continuum approaches are not applicable to membranes whose thickness in on the order of magnitude of the dimension of a single molecule.

Xuanhe Zhao and Zhigang Suo  We develop a thermodynamic model of electrostriction for elastic dielectrics capable of large deformation. The model reproduces the classical equations of state for dielectrics at small deformation, but shows that some electrostrictive effects negligible at small deformation may become pronounced at large deformation.