In addition to the problem sets listed on the assignments page, students formed groups to investigate one of the following mechanics topics. Each group created a Wiki to answer questions from the professor and present their findings.
Project Requirements
Pre-PS1: By the end of the second week, please form groups of 4 or fewer by signing up for a topic of choice on the "Groups" child page linked below.
PS1: Create a child page with your group, including a title indicating your chosen special topic; list of team participants/emails; and complete journal citations and .pdf attachments for 3 papers related to your special topic which you have selected from the open literature:
- General review of the material/application/mechanical behavior phenomenon you have chosen (e.g., overview of battery materials or challenges in III-V performance). This paper should be from 2004-present;
- Original research article highlighting mechanical behavior relevant to this material/application expressed as elasticity, plasticity, creep, fracture, and/or fatigue. This could be experimental, analytical, computational, or combination of three. This paper can be published from any period, but the more recent, the better.
- Original research article explaining in detail the mechanisms of mechanical behavior discussed in article 2. This need not be in the same material class or application (e.g., analytical analysis of brittle fracture in ceramic oxides that are not, themselves, used as battery materials), but needs to include experimental, modeling, and/or computational analyses of mechanical behavior that you feel *at this point* are over your head and difficult to understand based on your current knowledge. This paper can be from any period and, for the best written papers of mechanical behavior fundamentals, is likely not to be particularly new. Please do not ignore old papers – often, the core concepts of a field are cyclically published, meaning that we keep rediscovering the same things because we fail to read the literature thoroughly.
Please note that you'll be considering these articles in detail, so choose ones you'll enjoy getting to know well. I suggest starting a search with Science Citation Index via Web of Science, which is available through MIT's library service, Vera. GoogleScholar is really not a scholarly search of the current literature I've looked around, and there are very good, recent overview articles for almost all of the special topics you have selected.
PS2: Address specific questions listed on your team Wiki page, related to Paper 1. These can be answered directly on the Wiki page, creating a study that will frame your final presentation, or you can create "child pages" linked to the page you created for PS1. Format is up to you, but set it up in a way that you will carry through for the rest of the term.
PS3: Address specific questions listed on your team Wiki page, related to Paper 2 and/or 3. All teams have the same part (a), which is to address any comments related to completion of PS2 Wiki content.
PS4: No modifications required.
PS5: Address specific questions listed on your team Wiki page. All teams have the same part (a), which is to address any comments related to completion of PS3 Wiki content. Note that this is the final content modification requested; PS6 will include preparation of slides to share with rest of class on your special topic.
PS6: Use this template to create a <12 minutes slide presentation that summarizes your study for the class. Do not add any slides to this deck, just modify the template to keep it short and sweet. Note that you will answer questions on quiz 3 related to this content, so do your best to share this information accurately and concisely. Have fun! (PDF)
Group Projects
All material here is presented courtesy the students named on each page, and is used with their permission.
- Plasticity and fracture of microelectronic thin films/lines
- Effects of multidimensional defects on III-V semiconductor mechanics
- Defect nucleation in crystalline metals
- Role of water in accelerated fracture of fiber optic glass
- Carbon nanotube mechanics
- Superelastic and superplastic alloys
- Mechanical behavior of a virus
- Effects of radiation on mechanical behavior of crystalline materials