My name is Georges Ayoub; I am looking for a postdoctoral research position in mechanical and material engineering in the field of the polymer science, polymer behaviour and fatigue.
I am presently preparing my last year of PHD at Lille1 university (north France) and ill defence my thesis in September 2010. I am very motivated to start a Postdoctoral position, at the end of my thesis, in a Anglo-Saxon country.

Thanks to Marino, I have found the reason for the difference in our bending stiffness calculation. The original discussion is here:
http://imechanica.org/node/4029

The reason why we have a higher bending stiffness is due to the dihedral term. This dihedral term does have a significant contribution to the bending stiffness. However, in Ref. [26], apparently, this dihedral term was ignored.
I have written a short document showing the contribution of the dihedral term to the bending stiffness. Please take a look at the attachment.
I received great help from Dr. Huang and Marino. Thank you very much.

Qiang Lu and Rui Huang

Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering mechanics, University of Texas, Austin,
TX 78712, USA

Electro-sensitive (ES) elastomers form a class of smart materials whose mechanical properties can be changed rapidly by the application of an electric field. These materials have attracted considerable interest recently because of their potential for providing relatively cheap and light replacements for mechanical devices, such as actuators, and also for the development of artificial muscles. In this paper we are concerned with a theoretical framework for the analysis of boundary-value problems that underpin the applications of the associated electromechanical interactions. We confine attention to the static situation and first summarize the governing equations for a solid material capable of large electroelastic deformations. The general constitutive laws for the Cauchy stress tensor and the electric field vectors for an isotropic electroelastic material are developed in a compact form following recent work by the authors. The equations are then applied, in the case of an incompressible material, to the solution of a number of representative boundary-value problems. Specifically, we consider the influence of a radial electric field on the azimuthal shear response of a thick-walled circular cylindrical tube, the extension and inflation characteristics of the same tube under either a radial or an axial electric field (or both fields combined), and the effect of a radial field on the deformation of an internally pressurized spherical shell.

I would like to propose the recent papers by Janmey, P.A., and coworkers on the nonlinear elasticity behavior of biopolymer gels for "biomechanics" issue in J Club. In their original work, they proposed the biopolymer network model composed of semi-flexible polymers that behave like a worm-like-chain (WLC) model. Their models surprisingly capture the mechanical response of biopolymer gels such as neuro-filaments. The details of their work are as follows: