The 9th US National Congress on Computational Mechanics will feature a student presentation competition. This competition continues in the format pursued at the recent World Congress in Los Angeles. It is open to students who have an abstract accepted for presentation at the Congress.
November 9, 2000
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.
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
USNCCM IX, July 22 - 26, 2007
Pre- & Post-Congress Short Courses, July 22 & 26, 2007
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
San Francisco, California
BACKGROUND AND SCOPE
From their inception in 1991, the biennial congresses of the United States Association for Computational Mechanics have become major scientific events, drawing computational engineers and scientists worldwide from government, academia, and industry. The Ninth U.S. National Congress on Computational Mechanics (USNCCM IX), hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, will feature the latest developments in all aspects of computational mechanics, and will broaden the definition of the discipline to include many other computation-oriented areas in engineering and sciences. From applications in nanotechnology and bioengineering, to recent advances in numerical methods and high-performance computing, the technical program will reflect the Congress theme of "Interdisciplinary Computation''. In addition to plenary lectures and minisymposia that highlight the latest trends in computational mechanics, pre- and post-conference short courses addressing advances in multiscale and multiphysics methods, as well as other topics, will be held. Numerous vendor exhibits from Bay Area and national companies and organizations are also planned. Detailed information on USNCCM IX can be found at:
http://me.berkeley.edu/compmat/USACM/main.html
I like to keep the mindset of being a student, learning from all sources on all topics I am interested. Recently I have learned quite a lot about mechanics and mechanicians from Applied Mechanics News and its sister blogs and now iMechanica.
With a job as an assistant professor, I always try to motivate my students to become future mechanicians. For this reason, I started Modeling Place as a group blog in January and gently forced my students to participate. Out of the five students I have, two actively participate by posting frequently, two occasionally post, and one dropped out quickly after one post. Together, the blog has been doing reasonably well, in terms of both quantity and quality of posts.
I learned a few tricks in handling images and got to know some interesting works in the general area of mechanics. How about the students? What benefits have they received? I have to ask them. For one, I awarded one student with a little gift as the best post of the semester. More importantly, I believe that they are reading more than they used to do, thus gaining broader knowledge and interest in mechanics and related science. They not only read the posts in the blog but also read from other sources (online or not) to find something to post. Furthermore, they have a place to practice writing. It is a big step from reading to writing, not only for foreign students I think.
It may be still too soon to tell how well this works, but the students themselves should be able to tell us more. If you are a student, I encourage you to comment on this to tell the professors what you like or don't like about iMechanica. At this stage of development, much more features and benefits can be accomodated. Your ideas could shape the future of iMechanica and benefit all students and those considering themselves as students of life.
Nanocomposite performance fundamentally relies on reproducible dispersion and arrangement of nanoparticles, such that the dominate morphology across macroscopic dimensions is also nanoscopic. To facilitate dispersion, chemical approaches, including surfactant or macromolecular stabilization are usually employed to modify the surface of nanoparticles. However, the approach depends on the material system and usually involves trial-and-error to identify the best practice. Much less quantitative information is available on the coupling between the surface modification and external processing factors, including shear, electric or magnetic fields. In a recent work, we considered electric field on the interaction of nano-plates. For ideal dielectrics an electric field may assist (or retard) exfoliation depending on the angle between a collection of plates and the field. A critical electric field strength to promote exfoliation is predicted when the field is parallel to the surface of the plates. Structural refinement is predicted to occur by cleavage through the center of the stack. For lossy dielectrics, frequency can be tuned to cause exfoliation in all plate orientations.
