Attached is the first announcement and call for papers for "nanomech 8", the 8th European Symposium on Nanomechanical Testing to be held in Huckelhoven, Germany, 3rd-5th September, 2007. Full details are also available at the conference website. The special focus for this year's meeting is "Across the scales: Size effects and scaling phenomena in micro- and nano-mechanics". Abstracts are due 5th May, 2007.
Update: February 2012
1) The lecture notes are on Wikiversity at http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Waves_in_composites_and_metamaterials
2) The book on the topic can be bought from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Metamaterials-Waves-Composites/dp/1439841578
3) Solutions and errata can be found at node/9727
In this blog entry, I'll maintain a list of books, essays and websites that have influenced me in developing iMechanica. I'll also list my notes on them whenever available. Because iMechanica shares many common problems with other online communities, it is natural that we find solutions discovered by other online communities helpful. At the same time, iMechanica is unique in some respects, and has its own unique problems, so that we cannot adopt any methods or viewpoints without adjustment.
In his recent comment, Isabey discussed the issue of external stress/strain induced cellular stiffening. While the mechanism of this behavior is not fully understood and deserves further investigation, I would like to mention the cellular stiffening (increase of shear stiffness) that depends on the level of the endogenous contractile prestress (pre-tension) generated by myosin II-actin interactions.
Here you find a preprint version of a paper published in PRL 95, 114301 (2005) [also see Eur. Phys. J. E. 17, 261-281 (2005)] where the authors present a theory to explain why instabilities, e.g. stick-slip motion, is observed when cracks propagate in rubber materials.
猪年：身体健康, 家庭幸福, 事业丰收!
Are not as high as we expected although very stiff and strong nanotubes or nanofibers (Young’s modulus E~1000GPa) are added into soft polymer matrices like epoxy (E~4GPa). In our early investigation on the systematic mechanical property characterizations of nanocomposites (Xu et al., Journal of Composite Materials, 2004--among top 5 in 2005;and top 10 in 2006 of the Most-Frequently-Read Articles in Journal of Composite Materials.) have shown that there was a very small increase (sometimes even decrease) of critical ultimate tensile/bending strengths, and mode-I fracture toughnesses in spite of complete chemical treatments of the interfacial bonding area, and uniform dispersions of nanofibers (click to view a TEM image). Similar experimental results were often reported in recent years. Therefore, mechanics analysis is extremely valuable before we make these “expensive” nanocomposite materials. Our goal is to provide in-depth mechanics insight, and future directions for nanocomposite development. Till now, nanocomposite materials are promising as multi-functional materials, rather than structural materials. Here we mainly focus on two critical parameters for structural materials: tensile strength and fracture toughness. We notice that other mechanical parameters such as compressive strengths and Young’s moduli of nanocomposite materials have slight increase over their matrices.
Hello mechanicians,
What are the current research areas in computational mechanics? What is the future of CM? Where can one find such information on the net? Is there a central location?
In December 2007 Elsevier will organise the 2nd International Conference on Mechanics of Biomaterials & Tissues (www.icmobt.elsevier.com). The aim of the conference is to provide a forum for the discussion of the modeling and measurement of deformation and fracture behavior in biological materials and in those materials which are used to replace them in the human body.
