4/8/2013 Written by Susan Mumm
Written by Written by Susan Mumm
A group of AE researchers has earned the Best Paper Award from a major continuum mechanics conference held in February in Cambridge, the United Kingdom.
The International Association of Mechanical Engineers/World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society (IAME/WSEA) chose the paper, “Theory of designer nano-viscoelastic composites,” from the Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Continuum Mechanics.
Sharing in the honor are Emeritus Prof. Harry H. Hilton, Associate Prof. Ioannis Chasiotis and Mohammad Naraghi, who completed his doctoral degree in AE in May. Naraghi is now a post-doctoral research associate at Northwestern University.
The paper resulted from the group’s new approach in analyzing potential structural materials. Instead of designing structures around standard materials’ properties, Hilton and his collaborators attempt to determine the properties of ideal materials that would best suit the structure’s uses.
This way of looking at structural analysis and design is unique because it defines materials that do not yet exist. The work determines what attributes the materials should have to produce optimum results.
The formulas produced through the research also allow materials designers to input variables like cost, performance and weight.
The award paper is an application to nano-viscoelastic composites of the general theory of designer materials developed previously by Hilton, Daniel H. Lee and Abdoul A. El Fouly.
Currently Hilton, Lee and Craig G. Merrett are conducting research to generalize the fundamental paper still further to encompass entire flight vehicles (aerodynamics, control, stability, propulsion, structures). They estimate that for a large transport aircraft this would entail solving some 800,000,000 simultaneous equations and will necessitate the use of the IBM-NCSA peta-scale computing system, which will become operational in 2011.
Lee and Merrett are PhD candidates in AE.