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Professor Liviu Librescu nominated for Presidential Medal of Freedom

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

The governor of Virginia has asked President Bush to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to  Professor Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor who died trying to save his students during the mass killings at Virginia Tech.  Read more.

The one-million-dollar Kavli Prizes in Nanoscience, Neuroscience and Astrophysics call for nominations

Submitted by Zhiliang Zhang on

The Kavli Prize – three international awards for outstanding contributions to the fields of nanoscience, neuroscience and astrophysics – will be awarded for the first time in 2008. The Kavli Foundation has established these international awards to recognize seminal advances in scientific research. Each prize will consist of a scroll, a medal and a cash award of USD 1 million.

The Prizes will be awarded at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway, Fred Kavli’s native country, every two years, beginning in 2008.  http://www.kavliprize.no/

A strained film grown on a vicinal substrate: Steps bunch or not to bunch?

Submitted by Zhenyu Zhang on

When a strained film is grown on a vicinal substrate, the steps advance like a train when the deposited atoms have sufficient mobility to reach the step edges. However, as the steps advance, the strain-induced force monopoles associated with the steps cause the steps to attract to each other (J. Tersoff, PRL 74, 4962, (1995)), resulting in a thermodynamic instability of the steps in the form of step bunching (J. Tersoff, et al., PRL 75, 2730 (1995)).

20th Annual Melosh Competition at Duke University

Submitted by John E. Dolbow on

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.   

Banding in FEM

Submitted by Ajit R. Jadhav on
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I know the following: In linear FE analysis with linear constitutive law, say CST, there will not be any discontinuity across the adjacent (or neighboring) elements, for any of the fields---displacements, strains or stresses. But I do have certain questions that are not very well addressed in the introductory FEM texts:

(i) Assuming a displacement-based formulation, under what conditions would you expect discontinuities (or inter-element banding) to possibly appear in: (a) stresses? (b) strains? (c) displacements?