Structural Health Monitoring Research Group at Columbia University - One of the most crucial elements for the overall safety of suspension bridges is, without doubt, the main cable. After many years of service, in-depth inspections of cable systems in suspension bridges often show that there are many broken wires inside the cables and at the anchorages.
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Mechanics of Quasi-Brittle Materials Research Group at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - Structural failures resulting from blast loads are highly nonlinear processes involving complex material constitutive behavior, post-peak material softening, localization, new surface generation via dynamic crack propagation, and ubiquitous contact.
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Geomechanics Research at Northwestern University - Evidence from recent laboratory experiments and field observations on porous rocks (and other materials) has indicated that compaction does not necessarily occur homogeneously, but, instead, is localized in narrow planar zones. These zones are typically nearly perpendicular to the maximum compressive stress.
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Computational Durability Mechanics Computational Mechanics at Ruhr University Bochum. The durability of civil engineering infrastructure made of porous materials is considerably affected by the accumulation of damage induced by time variant external loading in conjunction with physico-chemical processes (e.g. freeze-thaw action, chemical dissolution processes, chemical expansive reactions, reinforcement corrosion).
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Computational Multiscale Mechanics for Heterogeneous Porous Materials at University of Colorado at Boulder - Granular materials remain an unmastered class of materials with regard to modeling their spectrum of mechanical behavior in a physically-based manner across physically-based manner across several orders of magnitude in length-scale. They may transition in an instant from deforming like a solid to flowing like a fluid or gas and vice versa.
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Durability Mechanics at the University of California Berkeley - There is a pressing need to enhance the sustainability of our infrastructure. Concrete structures are deteriorating at a much faster rate than expected resulting in a massive need for repairs and premature replacement and costing billions of dollars annually. Deterioration is caused by mechanical loading conditions and expansive deterioration processes (corrosion, frost action, alkali‐silica reaction, and sulfate attack) which create tensile stresses that eventually lead to crack formation.
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Structures and Geomechanics at Stanford University - Material failure and/or damage typically involve some form of discontinuous deformation. A class of problems that has attracted significant attention involves intense inelastic deformation concentrated within a very narrow zone. Shear bands, compaction bands, and mixed-mode bands are examples of discontinuous deformation that do not produce stress-free surfaces, in contrast to opening mode fractures and cracks.
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Science of Building Materials Research Group at Princeton University - Deterioration of the infrastructure imposes huge costs on society, directly for repair and replacement, and indirectly by hampering economic activity and reducing quality of life. Moreover, manufacture of building materials contributes significantly to global warming. Our goal is to understand the fundamental mechanisms by which salt, ice, and other environmental agents cause damage to concrete and stone, so that the processes can be delayed or prevented.
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Professor Bernardino Chiaia and the Concrete Engineering & Sustainable Structures Research Group from the Politecnico in Torino, Italy, present their work on Eco-Mechanics of Robust and High-Performance Concrete. Core competencies include, mechanics of concrete structures, fiber-reinforced concrete, and recycled aggregate concrete.
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Geomechanics and Geophysics at Duke University - Failure in many engineering systems including geo-systems occurs at mechanically subcritical states, after both long- and short time exposure to adverse environmental conditions. These conditions include elevated temperature, due to embedded infrastructural elements, such as nuclear waste canisters, high voltage cables, mined hot fluids and gases or energy storage structures; ground water causing dissolution of minerals, changes in the former due to ionic concentration, strength, electric charge, acidity evolution; both evaporation and condensation of pore fluid, to mention the few.
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Cementitious Materials and Structures Group at TU Wien - Civil Engineering infrastructure and the materials making up these structures are typically hierarchically organized, i.e. characteristic heterogeneities manifest themselves at different, frequently size-separated scales of observation. Physico-chemical processes taking place at small scales frequently trigger the apparent behavior at larger scales. This is the motivation for bottom-up multiscale analysis of materials and structures. Reliable multiscale modeling includes strict quantitative testing of the predictive capabilities of the developed material models. To this end, it is essential to combine theoretical with experimental approaches.
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Granular Mechanics Lab at University of Southern California - Dense granular materials, such as sand, grains in a silo, and pharmaceutical powders, exhibit a unique class of material behavior: they behave as solids under static loading; but upon the initiation of initiation of instability, they flow like liquids. Accurate modeling of such materials remains a pressing challenge to both engineers and scientists studying natural or industrial flow phenomena such as landslides, segregation in industrial processing, and clogging in silo flow, to name a few.
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Poromechanics at Eindhoven University of Technology - Numerous saturated porous materials exhibit fracture and/or swelling. Ionized group, such as clay platelets, proteins or carboxyl groups attract counter ions and hence water. Examples are clay, clay-stone, shale, intervertebral disc, cartilage, hydro-gels, ion-selective membranes and living cells. The physico-chemical events associated with the swelling are intimately linked to the three-dimensional stress and strain distribution, fluid and ion flow.
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The Failure Mechanisms and Mechanics Laboratory at Cornell - Crack growth is inherently an atomic‐scale process as it entails the breaking of atomic bonds to create new surface area. However, bond breaking at the tip of a crack constitutes only a small portion of the energy dissipation associated with crack growth in a typical structural metal as the majority of energy dissipation is linked to continuum plasticity. Nonetheless, bond breaking at a crack tip often plays a governing role in the fracture process.
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Nano Infrastructure Research Group At University of Mississippi - During the last two decades, tremendous progress has been made in nanoscience. New classes of nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes, nanofibers, nanowires, and quantum dots are being assembled atom by atom, with various high tech applications in mind—electronics, biomedicine, energy, environment, etc. However, these materials are still very expensive, and can only be produced in relatively small quantities.
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Laboratory of Complex Fluids/Geomechanics Group at Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour - Mass transfer in tight porous materials is an issue which encompasses many engineering challenges: oil and gas production, confinement of nuclear and industrial waste, serviceability of pressure vessels, water treatment, geo-sequestration of CO2,… One of the key challenges is the assessment of the tightness of storage facilities or the enhancement of the production capacities of non conventional reservoirs omnipresent on Earth.
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Geometric Nonlinearities in Thin Elastic Structures MIT - Elasticity, Geometry and Statistics Laboratory The paradigm of studying the mechanics of thin structures (rods, plates or shells) is a field with a long history that is being revived and is rapidly burgeoning in new contexts. This effort is bringing to
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Engineering Mechanics Research Group at TU Vienna - Biomimetics deals with the application of nature‐made “design solutions” to the realm of engineering. In this context, mimicking biological materials with fine‐tuned mechanical properties has been on the agenda of engineering research and development for many years. The premise of biomimetics is that it is possible to reduce diversity and complexity of biological materials to a number of ‘universal’ functioning principles. This requires foremost a deep understanding of the hierarchical structure of biological materials.
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Concrete Mechanics Research at UC Boulder - Concrete materials may be characterized as cementitious composites made of coarse and fine particle aggregates embedded in hydrated cement paste. It is this binder which distinguishes concrete from porous materials with a solid skeleton which is partially saturated with pore water and air. Hence, hygro-thermal loadings in form of temperature and moisture changes are mainly governed by the solid skeleton of particle inclusions and the hydrated cement paste with pores which are filled with partially interconnected pore fluids.
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Intelligent Sensing for Structural Health Monitoring Structural Dynamics Research at the University of Michigan Civil infrastructure systems have been successful in supporting the economic prosperity of our nation. However, several serious issues must be urgently addressed to ensure our infrastructure can con
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Department of Mechanics, Faculty of Civil Engineering Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic - The development of nonlinear fracture process zones precedes the failure of quasibrittle materials (concrete, rock, tough ceramics, bones, ice etc.). These zones can be macroscopically described as regions (typically bands) of highly localized strains. The size and evolution of such localized bands depend on the material’s microstructure, in particular on the size and spacing of major heterogeneities.
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Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering Group at Georgia Tech - Pile foundations are by and large used for structures, piers and platforms on loose or soft soils, prone to liquefaction and lateral spreading during strong seismic events. The most widely employed approach for dynamic soil‐structure interaction analyses of piles in liquefiable soils is the Beam on Nonlinear Winkler Foundation (BNWF), according to which, the stiffness of pile springs (p‐y elements) derived for stiff, nonliquefiable soils is uniformly scaled via empirical factors that account for the reduction of soil resistance to seismic loading due to the development of excess pore water pressures.
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Mechanics of Materials at Northwestern University Advanced technologies have many important applications to infrastructures, such as stretchable electronics for reliability assessment, flexible and transparent silicon solar cells for energy efficiency. Mechanics plays a critical role in the development of the scientific and engineering foundations for these advanced technologies. One example is high performance electronics and optoelectronic systems that are reversibly stretchable/compressible.
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Microstructure and Rheology at ETH Zurich - Gels and glassy materials, from rubbers to cement, are ubiquitous in engineering applications because they can combine efficient flow and transport with cohesion, strength and flexibility. The “smart” mechanics of these systems originates from the disordered, heterogeneous microscopic structure. The interplay of aggregation, arrested kinetics and cooperative dynamics are all a hallmark of amorphous solidification, where stress transmission is far from trivial.
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Computational Mechanics at Columbia University - Traditional finite elements are limited in the modeling of weak discontinuities (e.g. multiphase materials) or strong discontinuities (e.g. cracks) as the mesh generated has to conform to the internal boundaries of these discontinuities. Moreover, when these cracks propagate in the domain, or when one solves repeated problems involving discontinuities (e.g. as part of a Monte Carlo process), then re-meshing the domain becomes non trivial, especially in 3D.
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Advanced Materials Research Group at North Dakota State University, Fargo - Natural and synthetic nanomaterials both exhibit unique and extraordinary properties that could be of tremendous interest for applications in engineering, medicine etc. The relationship between molecular interactions, microstructure and macroscale properties and thus the understanding of mechanisms leading to the properties are key to effective use and design of such materials. Our research group has made major strides in exploring and unearthing key mechanisms responsible for the extraordinary properties exhibited by nanomaterials such as nacre (the inner layer of seashells) and polymer clay nanocomposites (PCNs).
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Mechanics of Materials and Structures Research Group at M.I.T. - More concrete is produced than any other synthetic material on Earth. The current worldwide cement production stands at 2.3 billion tons, enough to produce more than 20 billion tons or one cubic meter of concrete per capita per year. There is no other material that can replace concrete in the foreseeable future to meet our societies’ legitimate needs for housing, shelter, infrastructure, and so on. But concrete faces an uncertain future, due to a non-negligible ecological footprint that amounts to 5-10% of the worldwide CO2 production.
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Mechanics of Materials and Structures Research Group at University of Minnesota - Collagen, a molecule consisting of three braided protein helices, is the primary building block of a many biological tissues including bone, tendon, cartilage and skin. Staggered arrays of collagen molecules form fibrils which arrange into higher ordered structures like fibers and fascicles. Because collagen fibrils play a crucial role in determining the response of these tissues to mechanical and chemical forces, significant research has and continues to be directed toward development of theoretical and multi-scale/multi-physics computational models of their stiffness, strength and toughness.
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Computational Solid Mechanics Group Louisiana State University - One of the key challenges in improving existing or developing new engineering materials with fine tailored mechanical performances is to link microstructure with macroscopic material behavior. While mean-field theories based on classical continuum approaches appropriately capture this link for elastic behavior, the development of a macroscopic model embedded with a micromechanics-based theory of inelasticity that could be used as an engineering theory for both the analysis and computer-aided design of materials, is still a challenging endeavour.
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Poromechanics Research Group at Université Paris-Est - At low temperatures benzene contracts when it solidifies, whereas water expands when freezing. But, at the same low temperatures, a sealed sample of benzene-saturated cement paste expands, whereas a water-saturated sample containing air voids contracts. A cement paste contains pores of various dimensions and, at small scales, the intermolecular forces play a major role in the pore deformation.
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PoroMechanics Institute at the University of Oklahoma - The PoroMechanics Institute (PMI), established in 1996, serves as a multidisciplinary research unit with focus on the understanding and application of the mechanics of fluid‐saturated porous media in general and the investigation of rock mechanics as applied to the oil and gas industry problems in particular.
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Stability of Micro- and Macro- structures University of South Brittany, France: LIMATB - ECoMatH Buckling may be the key factor in the morphogenesis of natural and biological entities (Darcy Thomson, 1959); and it is certainly a structural limit state that determines the design of many engineering structures.
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Computational Solid Mechanics at Johns Hopkins University - As part of research programs for NSF and Army Research Labs, Professor Graham-Brady’s group has been studying the effect of randomly occurring flaws on the strain-rate dependent strength of brittle materials, such as those used in ceramic armor or in cementitious materials. Because the these materials exhibit a high degree of scatter, a probabilistic framework is very useful in this context. The solution calls for a micromechanics-based study of dynamic crack growth from individual flaws, coupled to a larger macro-scale model of the over-all constitutive properties.
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Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics at MIT - Proteins—universally composed of long chains of only ≈20 unique amino acids that fold into complex molecular structures—are the main building blocks of life and realize a diversity of functional properties such as structural support, locomotion, energy and material transport, many of them simultaneously, to yield multifunctional and mutable materials. Despite this apparent functional complexity, the structural design of biological materials is often simple and has developed under extreme evolutionary pressures to facilitate a species’ survival in adverse environments.
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Computational and Stochastic Mechanics at USC - Recent innovations in science and technology have provided the impetus for a new paradigm in scientific discovery. Thus, while new sensing technologies allow us to probe nature with unprecedented accuracy, new computing resources allow us to account for great complexities in physical behavior. These newfound capabilities have heightened society’s expectations from the scientific process, requiring it to provide foresight and thus mitigate risks associated with ever-increasing complexity.