Participant Support for IUTAM Symposium Material Instabilities and the Effect of Microstructures

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Instability plays a crucial role in the design of solids and structures as it often limits their performance from their manufacturing stage to their installation and operation. The design of more effcient structures motivated the enormous progress in structural stability acheived during the period of 1940-70. More recently, the ares has received a new impetus form instabilities at the material level. This is partly due to the advent of new materilas but, also due to continuing efforts to develop constitutive laws and failure criteria for more conventional materials. Like in the more classical problems, such instabilities are governed by non linear interaction of geometry and material properties which now are related to the microstructure of the material. Examples of this class of relatively new problems are kinking failure in fiber composites in compression and in wood, stress induced transformations in shape memory alloys, shear licalizaion in metal mono- and polycrystals,and localization of deformation in compressed cellular materials. Similar problems are also known to govern the behavior of granular materials, rocks, concrete and several polymers.