Dr. Kenneth Reifsnider
Presidential Distinguished Professor, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, UTA
Director, Institute for Predictive Performance Methodologies, UTARI
Member: National Academy of Engineering
Composite materials are not just the sum of their parts, they are often engineered systems that function with properties and behavior that results from the interaction of the constituents. That interaction may depend on location, size, shape, orientation, morphology, interfaces, and even active fluxes that result from applied fields and potentials. These “epigenetic” features represent a great opportunity for design and development of composite systems for many applications, but they are also a great challenge to our understanding and to our ability to anticipate them with rigorous models. We will examine a few examples of behavior that “doesn’t add up” the simple contributions of the constituents, and suggest that these internal interactions can be useful for various engineering purposes, including predicting as-manufactured strength, estimating remaining life, designing ceramic membranes for nuclear containment and chemical refinement, and converting and storing energy. We will also comment on some elements of multi-physics, multiscale analysis that can help us to represent some of the multifunctional behavior of some example systems.
When: Friday, October 16, 2:00PM
Where: Woolf Hall, room 402