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Mechanics of Advanced Materials Professor Brinson's research interests lie in the study of advanced material systems and developing new methods to characterize and to model material behavior. Advanced materials can be defined as those that synergistically combine advantages of two or more materials (multiphase polymers and composites); materials that act as both control elements and structural elements (such as piezoelectrics, shape memory alloys, or magnetostrictive materials); microstructurally designed material systems (e.g., micorporous alloys and hierarchically reinforced nanocomposite systems). The technological advantages of these materials over traditional materials ultimately stem from particular microstructural or molecular properties. These distinct properties provide interesting challenges for experimental analysis and constitutive descriptions, so that many traditional concepts of deformation, fracture and failure must be reassessed. The objective of Professor Brinson's research is to characterize and model advanced materials systems, at scales spanning the range of molecular interactions, micromechanical and macroscopic behavior. Specific current and future interests include continued work with characterization of nanoparticle reinforced polymers, the phase transformation response of shape memory alloys, aging in polymeric based systems, and investigation of microstructure effects on properties of microporous materials for bioengineering. The research encompasses analytical, numerical and experimental investigation. Analytical micromechanics methods, finite element simulations of scanned material microstructures, and results from molecular level simulations are combined with continuum mechanics techniques to provide microstructurally based prediction of macroscopic environmental-mechanical response. On the experimental side, smaller scale testing includes optical and electron microscopy of samples with in situ loading, for example examining reorientation of martensitic variants with applied load in shape memory alloys. Macroscopic scale testing of samples in environmentally controlled chambers are also performed and the results of experiments are used to refine and better define models for advanced materials. In the Classroom Professor Brinson has been integrally involved in the development of the novel Engineering First undergraduate curriculum at Northwestern University. She taught enhanced sections of sophomore level "mechanics of materials" where matrix methods of structural analysis were integrated using finite element syntax. This course was subsequently used as part of the basis for the second course in the Engineering Analysis sequence, Mechanics. Professor Brinson was also a co-developer of the third course in the EA sequence, Dynamics of Systems. The four course Engineering Analysis sequence teaches freshman engineering students the fundamentals of matrix algebra, differential equations, mechanics, dynamics, and computer programming in an integrated fashion with emphasis on engineering applications. Professor Brinson has also developed a graduate course entitled Mechanics of Advanced Materials, in which microscale mechanisms and their relation to macroscopic behavior and mathematical constitutive modeling for advanced material systems is developed, with emphasis on polymer viscoelasticity and shape memory materials. Selected publications Liu, H; Brinson, L.C., A Hybrid Numerical-Analytical Method for
Modeling the Viscoelastic Properties of the Polymeric Nanocomposites,
Journal of Applied Mechanics, vol. 73 (5) pp. 758-768 (2006). |
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