The MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (@MITMechE) seeks candidates for faculty positions starting July 1, 2024 or on a mutually agreed date thereafter. More Info + Apply: meche.mit.edu/faculty-positions Questions: mefacultysearch2024 [at] mit.edu
Next USACM Nanotechnology and Lower Scale Phenomena TTA, webinar is on December, 6 at 2pm central.
Our speaker will be Dr. Timofey Frolov from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with Prof. Fadi Abdeljawad, Lehigh University as the discussant.
We are hoping the format will promote a lively interactive discussion and engage both junior and senior members of our community.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Date/Time: December 6; 2-3pm CST
Selected courses delivered in the A.Y. 2023/24 by professors of the Multi-scale Analysis of Materials Research Unit at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca for:
- PhD programme in Systems Science, Track in Computational Mechanics
- PhD programme in Management of Digital Transformation
will be open to incoming visiting students (in person or remote participation is possible), without fees.
On November 2023 the research unit MUSAM -Multi-scale Analysis of Materials- at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca turns 10!
To celebrate the contributions made to computational and experimental mechanics over the past 10 years, and to acknowledge the PhD students, researchers and visiting professors that have animated the research unit, I am pleased to share with you a 10-year impact report.
I hope you might find it interesting and inspiring for future collaborations!
S-Lab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University is opening one Ph.D. position for “mechanical metamaterials.” The applicants should have a master’s degree by August 2024.
Send an application package (Letter of Intent and CV) to jaehyung.ju [at] sjtu.edu.cn (jaehyung[dot]ju[at]sjtu[dot]edu[dot]cn) before 12/6, 2023.
An exciting PhD opportunity, fully funded for UK/International tuition fees along with a stipend, is available at the National Decommissioning Centre (NDC www.ukndc.com) . This research project on ‘Long-term degradation of buried subsea pipeline coatings’ is funded by Chevron Corporation, NDC and the School of Engineering.
Please follow this link for more information or contact us directly:
The Jiawei Yang lab in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute has two fully funded PhD/Postdoc positions, starting in Fall 2024 or on a mutually agreed date. We aim to build an interdisciplinary research team, focusing on the Multiscale Engineering of Soft Material Systems, and developing high-performance, bio-integrated, and bio-interfacing soft material systems for health.
cdmHUB invites you to attend the Global Composites Experts Webinar Series.
Title: US-COMP: Next Generation of Composites Materials for Crewed Deep Space Missions
Speaker: Dr. Gregory M. Odegard, Michigan Technological University
Time: 12/14, 11AM-12PM EST.
Register in advance for this webinar: https://bit.ly/3uy3zpg.
Ernest Rabinowicz’s words, spoken two decades ago in his groundbreaking textbook on the friction and wear of materials [1], continue to resonate today: ’Although wear is an important topic, it has never received the attention it deserves.’ Rabinowicz’s work laid the foundation for contemporary tribology research [2]. Wear, characterized as the removal and deformation of material on a surface due to the mechanical action of another surface, carries significant consequences for the economy, sustainability, and poses health hazards through the emission of small particles. According to some estimates [1, 3], the economic impact is substantial, accounting for approximately 5% of the Gross National Product (GNP).
Despite its paramount importance, scientists and engineers often shy away from wear analysis due to the intricate nature of the underlying processes. Wear is often perceived as a ”dirty” topic, and with good reason. It manifests in various forms, each with its own intricacies, arising from complex chemical and physical processes. These processes unfold at different stages, creating a time-dependent phenomenon influenced by key parameters such as sliding velocity, ambient or local temperature, mechanical loads, and chemical reactions in the presence of foreign atoms or humidity.
The review paper by Vakis et al. [5] provides a broad perspective on the complexity of tribology problems. This complexity has led to numerous isolated studies focusing on specific wear mechanisms or processes. The proliferation of empirical wear models in engineering has resulted in an abundance of model variables and fit coefficients [6], attempting to capture the intricacies of experimental data.
Tribology faces a fundamental challenge due to the multitude of interconnected scales. Surfaces exhibit roughness with asperities occurring at various wavelengths. Only a small fraction of these asperities come into contact, and an even smaller fraction produces wear debris. The reasons behind why, how, and when this occurs are not fully understood. The debris gradually alter the surface profile and interacts with one another, either being evacuated from the contact interface or gripping it, leading to severe wear. Due to this challenge of scales, contributions of numerical studies in wear research over the past decades sum up to less than 1% (see Fig. 1). Yet, exciting opportunities exist for modeling, which we attempt to discuss here.
While analyzing a single asperity contact may not unveil the entire story, it arguably represents the most fundamental level to comprehend wear processes. This blog entry seeks to encapsulate the authors’ perspective on this rapidly evolving topic. Acknowledging its inherent bias, the aim is to spark controversies and discussions that contribute to a vibrant blogosphere on the mechanics of the process.
The subsequent section delves into the authors’ endeavors in modeling adhesive wear at the asperity level. Section 3 navigates the transition to abrasive wear, while Section 4 explores opportunities for upscaling asperity-level mechanisms to the meso-scale, with the aspiration of constructing predictive models. Lastly, although the primary focus of this blog entry is on modeling efforts, it would be remiss not to mention a few recent advances on the experimental front.
Successful applicants will work on the mechanics and thermodynamics of porous solids undergoing reactive flow within the scope of the DOE-funded center on Geo-processes in Mineral Carbon Storage (GMCS, https://gmcs.umn.edu). The mission of GMCS is to develop the fundamental science and engineering capability that will lead to realizing the full potential for large-scale subsurface storage of CO2 via mineralization.
