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Dr. Yonggang Huang, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Nothwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, was the invited speaker for the CE-CISMMS co-sponsored Graduate Seminar on March 9th. The title of his talk was, ‘Mechanics-guided, Deterministic 3D Assembly’. During his visit he met several faculty members from the different departments of engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering (WSE). He concluded his visit by meeting members of the CMRL at the third floor of Latrobe Hall.

Prof. Ghosh is invited to speak at the Materials Science Seminar series at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The seminar will be held on March 16th, 2017. During his visit, Prof. Ghosh will be meeting with members of the Materials Science and Engineering team.

Dr. Pedro Ponte Castañeda, the Raymond S. Markowitz Faculty Fellow and Professor, at the department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, at University of Pennsylvania, was the invited speaker for the CE-CISMMS co-sponsored Graduate Seminar on February 16th. The title of his talk was,’Nonlinear Composites Materials‘. During his visit he met several faculty members from the different departments of engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering (WSE). He concluded his visit by meeting members of the CMRL at the third floor of Latrobe Hall.

Congratulations to Dr. Somnath Ghosh, the Michael G. Callas Chair Professor in the department of Civil Engineering. He will receive the 2017 TMS Structural Materials Division Distinguished Scientist/Engineer award. Dr. Ghosh is the Director of the Computational Mechanics Research Laboratory (CMRL), the Center of Excellence on Integrated Materials Modeling (CEIMM) and the Center for Integrated Structure-Materials Modeling and Simulations (CISMMS).

This Minerals, Metals and Materials Society award recognizes an individual who has made a long-lasting contribution to the fundamental understanding of microstructure, properties, and performance of structural materials for industrial applications. The ceremony will take place in late February 2017 at the TMS Annual Meeting in San Diego, California.

On August 2nd, the White house hosted the fifth anniversary of the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) ushered in by President Obama, June 24, 2011. This event brought together senior Administration officials from the White House, DoD, DOE, NIST, and NSF, as well as experts from the industry, academia and government. The meeting of the minds discussed the importance of the MGI to the nation and what knowledge can be gained from its early successes as well as possible challenges that could impact this initiative. Among the invitees to this event is Prof. Somnath Ghosh (JHU) and Prof. Tresa Pollock (UCSB).

The International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) Symposium was successfully held in downtown Baltimore, Maryland, on June 20-22, 2016. This event, hosted by Johns Hopkins University-Whiting School of Engineering and co-sponsored by United States Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), brought together international experts in the field of Computational and Experimental Mechanics, and Materials Science.  The chair of the organizing committee, Prof. Somnath Ghosh, welcomed the congregation on the first day of the meeting and this was followed by opening remarks by the dean of the Whiting School of Engineering, T.E. “Ed” Schlesinger. The Whiting School’s associate dean of research, Dr. Larry Nagahara, made an appearance during panel discussions.

Seventy participants including thirty four invited speakers and eight panelists from academia, governmental agencies and the industry, presented and discussed their work over the three full days of meeting. Each day concluded with a panel discussion on relevant topics that were led by invited panelist members from industries and government laboratories. In addition to talks, a two-day poster session was included to display the latest research performed by invited junior faculty members and researchers.

Scope:

This IUTAM symposium addressed state of the art topics and emerging issues in the area  of Integrated Computational Structure-Material Modeling of Deformation and Failure under Extreme Conditions. This symposium brought together experts in the complementary fields of Computational and Experimental Mechanics, and Materials Science to discuss multidisciplinary approaches for integrating modeling and simulation, characterization and experiments to predict non-homogeneous deformation and failure in heterogeneous materials including metals, ceramics and composites. It focused on different material classes and covered a range of spatial and temporal scales needed for physics-based modeling of deformation and failure.

Effective methods of coupling multiple scales in regions of homogeneous and localized deformation leading to intense damage and failure were discussed. Use of probabilistic mechanics, incorporating data from imaging into modeling capabilities through uncertainty characterization of material structure, uncertainty identification in material properties, mapping material structure uncertainty to structural performance were discussed as essential ingredients of robust modeling process.  This conversation took place with a goal of developing a 10 year vision and planned for advancing the field to enable solving these technological, economic and social challenges.

Additional funding for this symposium comes from National Science Foundation (NSF), Army Research Organization (ARO) and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL).

Congratulations to Reza Yaghmaie for winning the ASCE-EMI Student Paper Competition in Dynamics at the Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) Conference, held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, May 22 to May 25, 2016. Reza Yaghmaie, is a graduate student and member of Prof. Somnath Ghosh’s Computational Mechanics Research Laboratory (CMRL).

Reza’s winning paper entitled, “Multi-Time Scale Coupled Transient Electro-Magnetic and Structural Dynamics Finite Element Analysis for Antenna Simulations”, describes the wavelet induced multi-time scaling computational model using the Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov algorithm for modeling functional materials with electro-magneto-mechanical couplings. Of special interest are the micro strip patch antennas used in unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) for military applications and monopole broadcasting antennas which appear in mobile satellite communications.

This paper applies the wavelet transformation based multi-time scaling method (WATMUS) for coupled transient electromagnetic nonlinear dynamical mechanical simulations in the finite element framework to overcome the drawbacks in computational modeling aspects which commonly leads to inadequate designs, hence restricting their widespread engineering applications.

Reza was one out of four student finalists whose papers were accepted for an oral presentation in front of the panel of judges for the prestigious EMI 2016 Dynamics Student Competition. The annual ASCE-EMI conference is considered the premier international conference in the field of Engineering Mechanics