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"Persistence of a pinch in a pipe" by L. Mahadevan, Ashkan Vaziri and Moumita Das

Submitted by Ashkan Vaziri on

The response of low-dimensional solid objects combines geometry and physics in unusual ways, exemplified in structures of great utility such as a thin-walled tube that is ubiquitous in nature and technology.

Viscoelastic Contacts

Submitted by MichelleLOyen on
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I was a little bit surprised in the introduction of this new forum to see mention of elastic and plastic contacts but no specific mention of viscoelastic contacts.


In the era of commercially-available instruments for indentation testing, the examination of viscoelastic contact mechanics, both in the context of polymers and biological tissues, seems to have taken on new life. To a first approximation, for indentation testing in the time domain, the fundamental mechanics has not much advanced beyond a few classic papers of the 1960s: Lee and Radok, J. Appl. Mech. 27 (1960) 438 and Ting TCT, J. Appl. Mech. 88 (1966) 845. However, the implementation of techniques for analysis of experimental data has progressed substantially. With spherical indenters the use of linearly viscoelastic models for characterization of a material creep or relaxation function is straightforward. Recent experimental studies have confirmed this, while more lingering questions remain for sharp contacts including Berkovich pyramidal indenters (most commonly shipped with commercial indenters). Sharp contacts seem to give rise to nonlinearly viscoelastic responses. Other topics of recent interest include frequency-domain measurements and examination of oscillating contacts and adhesion. (Although not mentioned in the listing of KLJ's most-loved topics in contact mechanics, viscoelastic contact has been the subject of several recent KLJ publications!)  Although research in viscoelastic contact mechanics has been strong in recent years, perhaps a challenge remains in the dissemination of information and the establishment of approachable experimental techniques for use by non-experts.

Interfacial toughness and mode mixity

Submitted by Jae-Hyun Kim on

When I was a graduate student, I spent several months to measure interfacial toughness between metalic (Cu and Au) films and thick substrates(Si and Polycarbonate). My methods were bulge test (blistering test) and 4-point bending test. I had many problems such as making an initial crack(pre-cracking), changing load phase angle applied to specimens, preparing/patterning thin films, constructing my own test apparatus, etc. The biggest problem was to measure the interfacial toughness over a wide range of loading phase angle. For a bimaterial with a non-zero oscillatory index(epsilon), we don't know the phase angle for a minimum interfacial toughness beforehand. Therefore, we need to measure the interfacial toughness over a wide range of phage angle. For engineering purpose, we need a minimum interfacial toughness value for reliability design because this value will lead to a conservative design of systems.

A paper on developing stochastic micromechanical model for elastic properties of functionally graded material (FGM)

Submitted by arindam.chakraborty on

Given link is for a stochastic micromechanical model developed for predicting probabilistic characteristics of elastic mechanical properties of an isotropic functionally graded material (FGM) subject to statistical uncertainties in material properties of constituents and their respective volume fractions.

Journal publishers are pioneers of Web 2.0

Submitted by Zhigang Suo on

Eric Mockensturm has just posted a publication agreement proposed by provosts of several universities. In structuring iMechanica, we have tried to avoid the question of open access, and simply asked the question what if all papers are already openly accessible. Many mechanicians have discovered iMechanica, and the registered users have recently passed 1000. Recent discussions of copyright on iMechanica have prompted Eric to post his entry, which has just led to this one.

Is there a shear instability in metal foams?

Submitted by Biswajit Banerjee on

Last year I spent three months modeling the compressive behavior of aluminum alloy foams. I had hoped to find some evidence of the banding instability that is often observed in elastomeric foams [1]. Lakes writes that this sort of banding instability provides indirect experimental evidence for negative shear modulus [2].

Deformation of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Silver Nanowires

Submitted by amleach on

I wanted to share some our work on the deformation behavior of metal nanowires that was recently published in Advanced Functional Materials. In this work, we considered the tensile deformation of three experimentally observed silver nanowire geometries, including five-fold twinned, pentagonal nanowires. The manuscript abstract and urls to videos of the tensile deformation of the three nanowire geometries are below. A copy of the manuscript is attached.

Tension-Compression Asymmetry in Homogeneous Dislocation Nucleation

Submitted by Mark Tschopp on

Abstract. This letter addresses the dependence of homogeneous dislocation nucleation on the crystallographic orientation of pure copper under uniaxial tension and compression.  Molecular dynamics simulation results with an embedded-atom method potential show that the stress required for homogeneous dislocation nucleation is highly dependent on the crystallographic orientation and the uniaxial loading conditions; certain orientations require a higher stress in compression (e.g., <110> and <111>) and other orientations require a higher stress in tension (<100>).  Furthermore, the resolved shear stress in the slip direction is unable to completely capture the dependence of homogeneous dislocation nucleation on crystal orientation and uniaxial loading conditions.