The word "extreme" seems to be "trending" a lot these days, see the recent discussions on the new journal Extreme Mechanics Letters.
My collaborator Ruben Sevilla at Swansea and I were interested in very curved crack paths that develop in nature and have been replicated experimentally in thin films attached to elastic substrates.
Thermo-hydro-mechanics (THM) is a branch of mechanics aimed to predict how deformable porous media behave, while heat transfer and fluid transport simultaneously occur in the pores filled by liquid and/or gas. Understanding these multi-physical responses is important for a wide spectrum of modern engineering applications, such as tissue scaffolding, geothermal heating, mineral exploration and mining, hydraulic fracture, energy piles, tunneling with frozen soil and nuclear waste storage and management.
http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1PcEa6EHNeGWdB
Highlights:
Journal of Applied Mechanics (JAM) received 280 submitted manuscripts during the first 6 months in 2014. Among them only 4 are still in review.
The average time for the 1st round of review, with the decision to accept, or reject, or revise, is reduced to 10 days. For those that need revisions, the average time to make the final decision is 24 days after the 1st round of review, which include both the authors' revision time and 2nd (and more) round(s) of review.
Fracking has been an important research topic in recent years. JAM just published a paper "Why Fracking Works" by Professor Zdenek Bazant and his co-authors (JAM, volume 81, paper 101010, 2014). This paper is of great interest, not only to mechanics, but also to engineers interested in fracking.
The paper is attached.
Nanocomposite structure, consisting of hard mineral and soft protein, is the elementary building block of biological materials, where the mineral crystals are arranged in a staggered manner in protein matrix. This special alignment of mineral is supposed to be crucial to the structural stability of the biological materials under compressive load, but the underlying mechanism is not yet clear.
JMPS paper: "Some basic questions o mechanosensing in cell–substrate interaction"
In this paper, a mechanical model of cell-substrate interaction is constructed and discovers the mechanisms of cell sensing compliance, thinckness and distance. If you are interested, pls see details in the paper.
Dear All,
I am trying to model a fiber reinforced concrete slab on steel beams. I have applied the load in the first step and applied thermal conditions (convection and radiation) in the second step. The analysis reached 400seconds (tops) ( I was expecting 7000s). I have modeled the structure with solids. Slab tied to the beam.
the analysis was run with Abaqus Standard. I have tried the same model using Explicit but the second step won't even start due to convergence. I tried contact between slab and beam.
There have been several discussions on "Extreme Mechanics" in recent weeks and I would like to extend this topic to "Extreme Computing". As we develop materials that are more complex, hierarchical and are spanning multiple spatial scales, we will need computational tools that can describe them well. Fluid dynamics community has long time ago embraced large-scale computing of conservation laws of mass, momentum and energy. In mechanics of materials, large-scale computing is still in infancy.
For flexible electronics applications it is important to understand the behavior of electrical resistance of metal films on polymer substrates under applied tensile strain. Although the growth of resistance during tensile loading was investigated in a number of research papers, the recovery of resistance during unloading remains virtually unexplored. In this paper, substantial recovery (decrease) of electrical resistance during and after unloading is demonstrated for copper films on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates subjected to a tensile strain with different peak values.
