Pradeep Sharma's blog

The Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University
of Houston (UH) invites applications for a tenured faculty position at the Full
Professor level beginning Fall 2013 or later. Successful candidates are
expected to establish an internationally recognized dynamic research program in
the area of experimental biomechanics and mechanobiology. Special preference
would be given to those pursuing cellular level and/or single molecule studies
of living systems with emphasis on healthcare applications. Highly qualified

It is my pleasure to announce the launch of the "Eshelby-UH Mechanics Award for Young Faculty". This award will be given annually to rapidly emerging junior faculty who exemplify the creative use and development of mechanics. The intent of the award is to promote the field of mechanics, especially among young researchers. While interdisciplinary work that bridges mechanics with physics, chemistry, biology and other disciplines is encouraged, the ideal awardee will demonstrate clear inspiration from mechanics in his/her research.

附加的论文对于publi最近被接受cation in Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

The Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Houston has an opening for a non-tenure track instructional faculty position. The ideal candidate should be passionate about teaching will be expected to teach 3 undergraduate courses a semester and help with ABET. A competitive 9-month salary is expected and summer support is possible as well. Although the position is non-tenure track, our intention would be to hire someone for the long-haul.

Two post-doctoral fellow positions are available in Sharma's research group at University of Houston. Potential candidates can visit the following website to get an idea of the kind of research projects undertaken in this group:http://www2.egr.uh.edu/~psharma/index.html. The positions are for one year but renewable for a second year upon satisfactory performance. Candidates are expected to be familiar with both atomistic calculation methods and continuum mechanics.

For both mechanicians and physicists, linking continuum concepts to the underlying microscopic characteristics of materials has remained a major preoccupation. Certainly, with the recent advent of the so-called "multiscale" modeling approaches, this topic has been brought to a sharp focus. Cauchy stress is one such continuum concept that has courted a fair amount of controversy.

The Cullen College of Engineering of the University of Houston invites nominations and applications for the position of Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME). As part of a major drive for excellence, the college seeks innovative and enthusiastic leadership to build upon the strengths of the research and educational programs of the ME Department. The successful candidate must possess academic skills and credentials of the highest caliber, with an established national and international reputation in research, and academic and professional leadership in Mechanical Engineering or related fields. Credentials appropriate to the rank of Professor are required.

I plan to submit the attached paper on quantum mechanical definition of stress in the next few weeks. Comments and feedback are welcome. Fair amount of work has been done on stress definition in the context of classical molecular dynamics (also attracting some controversies). In contrast, there appear to be several open issues in the quantum case. Hopefully, the attached paper provides a starting point.

Micromechanics---loosely speaking, is the study of heterogeneities in materials and its consequences for material or continuum behavior. This encompasses studies of inclusions, dislocations, cracks or more generally defects. A related problem is that of "coarse-graining" or in other words the effective homogenized properties of a heterogeneous material. The latter is a recurring theme in all of physical sciences not just solid mechanics. Micromechanics, a formidable subject by all means, dominated a substantial part of the history of solid mechanics. Several of ourTimoshenko awardeeshave been associated with this subject, e.g. Eshelby, Hill, Keller, Irwin, Rice among others.

In a recent rapid communication (see attached paper), using principles of pattern formation, we expose some simple stategies to reliably produce perfect long range order in self-assembling systems. Most self-assembling systems exhibit short ranged order. This imperfection is detrimental to several practical applications. It is almostalwayspossible to produce perfect patterns in small domain sizes but self-assembly over a larger areal span results in defects.

Xin-Lin Gaoand I had the pleasure of guest-editing a special issue on "scale effects in mechanics" for the journal, Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids (editor:Professor David Steigmann, UC Berkeley).

(Carbon) Nanotubes have attracted considerable attention from the mechanics community; probably second to none when it comes to nanotechnologies. Although I personally have done very little in this particular topic, I have enjoyed reading about the many developments made by mechanicians in terms of modeling the behavior of nanotubes and the applicability of standard continuum mechanics notions. A post on this subject on iMechanica, which received a fair amount of attention from many mechanicians involved in this topic, may be foundhere.

University of Houston
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Cullen College of Engineering
Faculty Position-Nano Mechanics, Nano Materials

For many mechanicians and materials scientists one of the most confounding things (in the ever increasing literature on carbon nanotubes) is the reported theoretical value of the nanotube elastic modulus. Depending upon the specific paper at hand, the reported numerical values range from 1 -6 TPa!

I had posted this on the amd blog...I am posting it here as well:

Last year I attended the annual American Physical Society conference held in Baltimore (during the week of March 13th). One of the non-technical sessions included presentations by the APS journal editors--Physical Review A/B/C/D/E and Letters---and a panel discussion related to these journals. Since many of our mechanics and materials colleagues nowadays are interested in publishing in these journals, I thought I should post a link to some of the slides(from the editors presentation) that I found interesting. Many of the slides presented at APS are in thelinked pdf filethat also includes additional (humorous slides!) regarding reviewer issues.

I thought I should take advantage of iMechanica and obtain feedback on some recent work that we did on nonlinear stability analysis of patterns.

A paradigmatic model that governs monolayer self-assembly was constructed a few years back by Wei Lu (Michigan) and Zhigang Suo. Apart from obtaining several physical insights they also conducted a linear stability analysis of their model. Borrowing technqiues from the nonlinear physics community, our work presents nonlinear stability analysis i.e. the initial state is no longer homogeneous and stable states beyond the transition are calculated. This allows a detailed construction of stability maps for various patterns without extensive numerical calculations.

This work is currently under review and I am attaching a pre-print with this post. Any comments and suggestions would be well-appreciated.

一个学生说我最近刊登的一篇文章physicsweb. This article discusses a new (scientific) ranking system developed by a German student (Michael Banks) in Max Planck Institute of Solid State Physics to characterize the "hotness" of the scientific subject. If, after reading the popular physicsweb article linked above, you are interested in more details you may wish to read the attached original article posted by Banks. "Carbon nanotubes" emerges at the top of the list.

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 anewsletter. 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 theamazon linkto this book