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19th Annual Melosh Competition at ETH Zurich

Submitted by John E. Dolbow on
conference
students

The 19th Annual Melosh Competition for the Best Student Paper on Finite Element Analysis will be held at ETH Zurich, on April 27, 2007.    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, but this is the first time it will be held outside the US.  We are presently seeking funds to provide travel fellowships for those students selected as finalists, as this represents an excellent opportunity for students to visit a world-class institution.  

Details on the competition and submission procedure can be found here.   The extended abstracts are due on January 8, 2007. I want to emphasize that the competition is really one on computational science.   As a result, papers on meshfree methods, molecular dynamics methods, their coupling with the FEM, etc., are welcome.   Please encourage your colleagues working in computational science to consider applying.  

Journal Club: Response/Feedback requested

Submitted by Pradeep Sharma on
opinion
Online Journal Club

Hello everyone,

I had previously posted this entry on the AMD blog and perhaps it worthwhile to post it again on this forum. I would like to solicit feedback and comments on an idea to further enhance the role and utility of iMechanica.

This inspiration comes from Bell labs and the physics community.....

They started a journal club (year 2003). Each month ONLY 2-3 already published recent journal papers are reviewed and commentary posted in the form of a newsletter. Since only 2-3 papers are reviewed, the selection is much more stringent and careful. The contribution is regular and periodic (monthly). Hence, this newsletter is taken seriously by physicists.

In our case, this can be done within iMechanica. I suspect we could achieve the same kind of interest if we restrict "notable" papers to 1-3 per month and make it a regular monthly feature. In principle anyone could submit a commentary but the blog moderators will select the top 2-3.

The operational rules are open for discussion. Briefly though, I am thinking on the lines of rotating 1-2 moderators with a term of say 2 months. The moderator will receive commentaries on recently published papers RELATED to mechanics area. The moderator will highlight 1-3 notable commentaries in the journal club newsletter. A key requirement must be that the commentaries/paper highlighted are related to mechanics in some form or the other. The concept of rotating moderator is to provide breadth and prevent bias of any one individual. Rotation of journal club moderators will also keep the "work-load" well distributed.

Collected Works of J.D. Eshelby

Submitted by Pradeep Sharma on
mechanician
book
Eshelby

Perhaps a post has already been made in this regard; A book containing all the papers by J.D. Eshelby was recently released by Springer. This book is compiled by Markenscoff and Gupta. Congratulations to both of them for such a great idea!

I bought this book last week and it is fascinating to read all of Eshelby's papers in chronological order. Furthermore, I found a few papers that I had not even been aware of. The price, at roughly $195 on Amazon is a bit steep but (in my opinion) well worth it. The book also contains forewords by several researcher who knew Eshelby personally.

Here is the amazon link to this book

Handbook of Materials Modeling

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on
research
materials modeling
book
by S. Yip (Editor), 2005

Book Review
"A new guide to materials modeling largely succeeds in its aim to be the defining reference for the field of computational materials science and represents a huge undertaking..." -- by James Elliott | University of Cambridge, Materials Today, Volume 9, Issues 7-8, July-Aug 2006, Pages 51-52.

Book Description

The first reference of its kind in the rapidly emerging field of computational approachs to materials research, this is a compendium of perspective-providing and topical articles written to inform students and non-specialists of the current status and capabilities of modelling and simulation. From the standpoint of methodology, the development follows a multiscale approach with emphasis on electronic-structure, atomistic, and mesoscale methods, as well as mathematical analysis and rate processes. Basic models are treated across traditional disciplines, not only in the discussion of methods but also in chapters on crystal defects, microstructure, fluids, polymers and soft matter. Written by authors who are actively participating in the current development, this collection of 150 articles has the breadth and depth to be a major contributor toward defining the field of computational materials. In addition, there are 40 commentaries by highly respected researchers, presenting various views that should interest the future generations of the community. Subject Editors: Martin Bazant, MIT; Bruce Boghosian, Tufts University; Richard Catlow, Royal Institution; Long-Qing Chen, Pennsylvania State University; William Curtin, Brown University; Tomas Diaz de la Rubia, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou, MIT; Mark F. Horstemeyer, Mississippi State University; Efthimios Kaxiras, Harvard University; L. Mahadevan, Harvard University; Dimitrios Maroudas, University of Massachusetts; Nicola Marzari, MIT; Horia Metiu, University of California Santa Barbara; Gregory C. Rutledge, MIT; David J. Srolovitz, Princeton University; Bernhardt L. Trout, MIT; Dieter Wolf, Argonne National Laboratory.

Question about dislocation nucleation sites in strained silicon-on-insulator

Submitted by Zhen Zhang on
industry
SOI
strained silicon

Electronic active device is built on the strained silicon-on-insulator (sSOI), e.g. strained Si layer on oxide, which in turn is bonded on bulk silicon wafer. Because no misfit dislocation can exist in strained silicon layer any more, will the dislocation be generated during later processing and operation? If there are still lots of dislocations in the strained silicon layer, where do they come from? Is there any experimental work to discover the dislocation nucleation sites? I guess they will nucleate from the triple junctions of gate-sSOI-cap, because the stress is singular in the triple junction. But I am not sure. So I want to know something about the experimental observations.

McMat 2007 Applied Mechanics and Materials Conference

Submitted by Ravi-Chandar on
conference
University of Texas at Austin
McMat 2007

The McMat 2007 conference, organized by the University of Texas on behalf of the Applied Mechanics and the Materials Divisions of the ASME, will be held in Austin, June 3-7, 2007.

We are now accepting proposals for symposia and abstracts of papers.

Saturated voids in interconnect lines due to thermal strains and electromigration

Submitted by Zhen Zhang on
research
suo group research
electromigration
interconnect

Zhen Zhang, Zhigang Suo, Jun He

Thermal strains and electromigration can cause voids to grow in conductor lines on semiconductor chips. This long-standing failure mode is exacerbated by the recent introduction of low-permittivity dielectrics. We describe a method to calculate the volume of a saturated void (VSV), attained in a steady state when each point in a conductor line is in a state of hydrostatic pressure, and the gradient of the pressure along the conductor line balances the electron wind. We show that the VSV will either increase or decrease when the coefficient of thermal expansion of the dielectric increases, and will increase when the elastic modulus of the dielectric decreases. The VSV will also increase when porous dielectrics and ultrathin liners are used. At operation conditions, both thermal strains and electromigration make significant contributions to the VSV. We discuss these results in the context of interconnect design.


This has been published and the related references are listed here:

  • Z. Zhang, Z. Suo, and J. He, J. Appl. Physics, 98, 074501 (2005). link
  • J. He, Z. Suo, T.N. Marieb, and J.A. Maiz, Appl. Phys. Lett. 85, 4639 (2004). link

 

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