The Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is actively seeking candidates for faculty positions in all areas of mechanical science and engineering.  Please see the official announcement below.

Faculty Positions in Mechanical Science and Engineering

I am working on a project "vehicle ride dynamics using component mode synthesis." I would be making a matlab code to determine the vehicle body response due to road excitation signals. I will be modelling the tyre stiffnesses using springs, suspension with springs and dampers and vehicle body using plate of varying stiffnesses. I want to know that how a vehicle body can be approximately modelled with a plate of varying stiffnesses so that it reflects the real car body, as just assuming it as plate( of constant stiffness) will be too crude approximation. Also i woluld like to compare various CMS methods like free interface, fixed interface, hybrid interface on this system. If anybody has done any work in this field please provide some guidance. 

Due to the migration of mobile molecules and ions, a thin diffusive layer of distributed charge - the electric double layer - forms at the interface between a polyelectrolyte gel and a liquid ionic solution.  When two polyelectrolyte gels are brought closely together, the electric double layers overlap and interact with each other, resulting in an effective repulsion.  The multiphysics coupling nature of soft gels makes their surface interactions significantly different from the interactions between rigid solids.

The electric-field-induced phase transition was investigated under mechanical confinements in bulk samples of an antiferroelectric perovskite oxide at room temperature. Profound impacts of mechanical confinements on the phase transition are observed due to the interplay of ferroelasticity and the volume expansion at the transition. The uniaxial compressive prestress delays while the radial compressive prestress suppresses it. The difference is rationalized with a phenomenological model of the phase transition accounting for the mechanical confinement.

In this paper, we study the effect of normal and shear strains and

oxygen vacancies on the structure of 180^o ferroelectric

domain walls in PbTiO_3.

Two PhD candidate positions are available in the Department of Mechanical engineering at the University of Rhode Island.  These fully supported positions are for thesis research to be performed in the area of microstructure/damage interactions in advanced superalloys at elevated temperature in both air and vacuum environment.  The successful candidate must have a Master degree in areas related to numerical simulation of material behavior using Abaqus platform, has exposure to mechanical testing and is strong in both materials science and mechanics.  Interested candidates can

The Department of Civil Engineering at NCSU has an opening for tenure track faculty position in the general areas of Structural Engineering and/or Mechanics. The plan is to hire the best candidate irrespective of the specific area of research focus. Interested applicants are urged to act quickly, as the final review of applications may begin as early as next week (the week of January 11). The official advertisement is given below.

Hi everyone,

    I am not a student majoring in the mechanics. But I have found that: the element eroding method is so powerful in numerical simulation (i.e. using ls-dyna) if we reduce the mesh size, then we can get a very perfect fracture process of material. So why we need fracutre mechanics?

The newly founded National Hypersonic Science Center -- Materials and Structures is to organize a minisymposium in this year's WCCM (2010) on VirtualTesting for Hybrid Hierarchical Materials for High TemperatureApplications. Please see the attachment for paper solicitation. We will greatly appreciate your consideration of submitting a paper to our symposium (minisymposium No. MS5041)