It has been quite some time (more than 1.5 years) that I had touched upon the topic of the physical bases of FEM in general, and of the general weighted residual (WR) approach in particular, at iMechanica (see here).
The position I then took was that there is no known physical basis at all for the WR approach---despite its loving portrayals in mathematical terms, or its popularity.
Hello,
The 53rd Congress of the Indian Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (an International Meet) is slated to be held during last week of December 2008, in Hyderabad, India. The last date for sending in both the abstracts and the full-length papers is 30th September, 2008.
People from outside India are especially encouraged to participate. Hyderabad is well connected by flights. Usually, the ISTAM conferences are low on budget but high on enthusiasm. The ISTAM conferences typically cover a broad range of topics.
I have quite a few ideas for MTech/ME/BTech/BE degree projects. The projects may be suitable in many different branches, including Mechanical, Computer Science, Metallurgical, Aerospace, Civil, etc. (In a few cases, MSc/M Phil students of departments like Physics or Computer Modeling and Simulation would be suitable too.)
All these projects are available for the new academic year (2008-09), at Pune, India.
I have quite a few things to tell...
My PhD defence at the University of Pune is already over.
I have also received post-doc offers, one from a group at MIT Boston, as well as another one from the University of California, Berkeley. The two offers followed within hours of each other. The jobs are in the computational sciences/engineering areas; the people were impressed by what I did in my PhD as well as my iMechanica writings.
I am designing a new course on FEM, to be offered privately in India. It will emphasize fundamentals, and try to supply (or bring out) the physical interpretations behind the mathematical formalisms.
See the following site:
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_index.html
And then, think: If you had to answer the same question, what would your answer be?
(BTW, I know I have quite a few comments to reply here, but somehow have not been able to find time to do so.... I will, soon enough... Anyway, in the meanwhile, wish you all a happy new year... And oh yes, I think it would be great if mechanicians could share their answers to the above referred question too.)
The best place to start is Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereology.
Most active research in stereology is done in medical and biological community.
Hello students (and also others) at iMechanica,
Last weekend, while channel browsing on TV, I happened to notice a documentary on the Hoover dam (in the US). It showed a number of jets of water, huge ones, forcefully springing forth out of the rock faces just downstream of the dam. These were the water jets coming off the electricity generation plant of the dam, *after* their job of generating electricity was already over.