industry

by Juil Yoon, Zhen Zhang, Nanshu Lu, Zhigang Suo

As well pointed out by Journal Club of March 2007, the flexible electronics is an emerging technology.

Simpleware Ltd., the world leader in image-based meshing software, has signed an agreement with Gaitech International Ltd. to resell the Simpleware suite of software products in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao.

Simpleware software offers an advanced solution to problems that were previously intractable due to the complexity in geometry reconstruction. Simpleware's technology has opened up numerical analysis (CFD and FEA) to a variety of applications, including biomedical engineering, material characterisation and industrial reverse engineering.

Initially posted on Applied Mechanics News on 28 April 2007.

Hot rolling from ingot is the dominant fabrication method of producing plate, sheet, and foil aluminum products. It is a striking fact that the total rolling-plant recovery of aluminum process from ingot to final products is typically about 50%. This recovery loss causes enormous amount of energy waste both as remelt energy and energy to process material that is just recycled. Assuming the annual US domestic net shipments of sheet and plate products being 10,500 million lb, 10% improvement of the hot rolling recovery will result annual savings of $126 million per year for the US domestic aluminum industry. The annual domestic energy savings would be 2.54 trillion Btu. The environmental benefits include annual reduction of 2.32 million lb SOx , 1.01 million lb NOx, 303.2 million lb CO2, 0.67 million lb of particulate, and 11000 lb VOCsd .

The fundamental inability to reduce or eliminate these recovery losses is “lack of the integrated models that relate structural properties to manufacturing processes”. Currently, processing parameters are determined by trial and error and largely based on experience. This makes it difficult to optimize the process even on the macroscale level, and almost impossible from microstructure level. Research in the following areas are desirable:

The following are links to the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) documents:

Mitigating the threat of terrorist attacks against high occupancy buildings is a challenging task.

Chapter 1: ASSET VALUE, THREAT/HAZARD, VULNERABILITY, AND RISK
This chapter presents several methodologies for architects and engineers to quantify risk and to identify the most effective mitigation measures to achieve a desired level of protection against terrorist attacks at an acceptable cost.

Abstract: Flexible electronic devices often require hermetic coatings that can withstand applied strains. This paper calculates the critical strains for various configurations of channel cracks in a coating consisting of organic and inorganic layers. We show that the coating can sustain the largest strain when the organic layer is of some intermediate thicknesses.

Flexible electronics are promising for diverse applications, such as rollable displays, conformal sensors, and printable solar cells. These systems are thin, rugged, and lightweight. They can be manufactured at low costs, for example, by roll-to-roll printing. The development of flexible electronics has raised many issues concerning the mechanical behavior of materials. This paper examines a particular issue: channel cracks in hermetic coatings.

Electronic devices (e.g., organic light-emitting devices, OLEDs) often degrade when exposed to air. Developing hermetic coatings has been a significant challenge. Organic films are permeable to gases, and inorganic films inevitably contain processing flaws, so that neither by themselves are effective gas barriers. These considerations have led to the development of multilayer coatings consisting of alternating organic and inorganic films. To be used in flexible electronics, these coatings must also withstand applied strains without forming channel cracks...