Hello Everybody, this is my first post here.

Dear Mechanicians,

I have got an offer to do PhD in computational seismology in a very good university in Europe, however, I have no idea what sort of career I should expect after getting my PhD in this field. I got my BSc and MSc in mechanical engineering but have never worked in the field of geophysics and seismology. Therefore I am hesitating whether to take the offer or not. 

Can anyone guide me in clearing this doubt? I would like to get the values of normalized flow stresses Vs Strain rate for 304 L stainless steel and Ti-6Al-4V. This values will be used as an input for simulating fan blade-out event. This values will be used since this process involves higher velocities, higher deformations and it occurs in less time.

Several methods have been proposed for numerical homogeniation of linear viscoelastic materials, mainly based on Laplace transform or on multilevel (FE^2) approaches. In this paper, we introduce a much simpler technique based on a discrete representation of the effective relaxation tensor related to the homogeneous medium, which can then be used to evaluate the constitutive law in the form of a convolution product. In practice, calculations on the RVE reduce to 3 transient simulations in 2D and 6  in 3D. More details in

The Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh anticipates an opening for a postdoctoral associate starting January 2012. The position’s primary area of research will focus on mechanics of micro-scale deformation processes and characterizing the thermomechanics of deformation at micrometer length-scales. Applicants with a strong background in computational solid mechanics and crystal plasticity will be preferred. 

Interested Applicants are requested to Email their CV to:  ravishm [at] pitt [dot] edu 

Dear My friends:

‚Source truncation and exhaustion: Insights from quantitative in-situ
TEM tensile testing' by D. Kiener and A.M. Minor (http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nl201890s).

We recently published two papers that present an optimization method to design multi-layer composites with damping properties. The method consists in adding elastomeric layers in the composite. In this way, a multi-criteria optimization tool has been developed to determine the best geometrical and material properties of the composite: position of the elastomeric layers, layers thickness, ...

Two new books:

M. Nosonovsky and P.K.Rohatgi Biomimetics in Materials Science:
Self-healing, self-lubricating, and self-cleaning materials (Springer
Series in Materials Science, Vol. 152, 2011, Hardcover, ISBN
978-1-4614-0925-0)

M. Nosonovsky and B. Bhushan (eds.), Green Tribology Biomimetics, Energy
Conservation, and Sustainability (Springer Series: Green Energy and
Technology, 2011, Hardcover, ISBN 978-3-642-23680-8 )