The full program for the 3rd International Conference on Engineering Failure Analysis is available at www.icefa.elsevier.com. Join your peers and take advantage of the 15% "early bird" discount by registering for this popular and well-received single stream meeting before 30 April. The conference takes place July 13-16 in the beautiful coastal town of Sitges, just a few miles from Barcelona's international airport. 

Hi everyone,

I am trying to build polycrystal plasticity model  by using UMAT subroutine in ABAQUS. As we know, the orientation of grain is always espressed by Euler's angles. What I want to know is  how to assign different initial orientations to different grains using Euler's angles in Umat subroutine. Could anybody tell me how to do? Is there any example ?

Many Thanks,

Yuanpei

Rob Wood teaches a course on micro/nano robotics, and asks me to give a 30-minute tutorial on the theory of dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs).  I attach my slides, which might be useful to you if you'd like to include this topic in your class.  The tutorial draws upon work in the literature, as well as recent work in my group:

(This message was sent to iMechanica by Ken Chong, of the National Science Foundation).  This letter is to call your attention to an opportunity to broaden participation particularly of underrepresented students in Ph.D. programs in engineering through supplements to current research grants funded by the divisions in the Directorate for Engineering (ENG) at the National Science Foundation.

The main idea is the following: a most natural mathematical setup for considering the motion of the void-solid interface of an expanding void is that of the traveling wave. Thus, a theory for macroscopic damage evolution may be suspected as being a homogenized version of basic theory that has such wave phenomena as an essential ingredient. This paper is a first step in probing such questions. 

Early this week the number of registered users passed 6000.  Our growth rate remains nearly a constant, about 10 new users per day. In January Teng plotted some basic statistics of iMechanica.