Please join us on Friday as we host Dr. Derek Warner from the Cornell University. Below you’ll find details on the talk, entitled “Harnessing Atomistic Modeling to Improve the Reliability of Structural Components .” The seminar starts at 1:10 pm in the Waterman Building, room 427. As usual, join us at 1 pm for cookies, coffee and tea!

Harnessing Atomistic Modeling to Improve the Reliability of Structural Components by Derek Warner Associate Professor and Associate Director of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca NY.

Abstract: The prediction of crack growth is one of the most technologically important and scientifically intriguing problems in mechanics of materials. Yet, despite decades of research, a comprehensive understanding of the process has remained elusive. As a quintessential multiscale phenomenon, crack growth is both a chemical and mechanical process, involving interatomic bond breakage driven by long range mechanical stress fields. Thanks to growing supercomputing resources and novel concurrent multiscale modeling techniques that can accurately couple quantum and continuum mechanics modeling domains, crack tip processes in real environments are just now becoming accessible to powerful quantum chemistry approaches such as Kohn Sham Density Functional Theory. The majority of our work in this area has been focused on understanding how environment and impurity elements influence the behavior of cracks in aluminum and silicon carbide. In this talk, I will review our most exciting findings on this topic and discuss a general strategy for utilizing atomistic-scale modeling in the context of engineering-scale mechanical performance.

Bibliographical Sketch: Derek Warner is an Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University, where he also serves as the Associate Director. Prior to his arrival at Cornell in 2007, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Division of Engineering at Brown University, where he worked in the Mechanics of Solids Group. He completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in 2006. He has held visiting appointments at the US Army Research Laboratory and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. He is currently the director of the Cornell Fracture Group, which conducts both scientific and engineering research aimed at understanding and predicting the deformation and failure of structures.

General Event Info: The Department of Mechanical Engineering invites you to our weekly graduate seminar on Friday, starting at 1:10 pm, in the Waterman Building (Rm 427). Join us early for refreshments at 1 pm. All talks are open to the public.