CSE Seminar

Speaker:  Prof. Chris Rycroft, UC Berkeley (Math)

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Title:

Modeling the toughness of metallic glasses
Abstract:
Metallic glasses are a new type of alloy whose atoms have an amorphous arrangement in contrast to most metals. They have many favorable properties such as excellent wear resistance and high tensile strength, but are prone to breakage in some circumstances, depending on their method of preparation. The talk will describe the development of a quasi-static projection method within an Eulerian finite-difference framework, for simulating a new physical model of a metallic glass. The simulations are capable of resolving the multiple timescales that are involved, and provide an explanation of the experimentally observed differences in breakage strength, which may aid in the use of these materials in practical applications. The same Eulerian simulation framework can be adapted to address a variety of other problems, such as fluid-structure interaction, and the mechanical modeling of multicellular clusters.

Biography:
Chris Rycroft is a Morrey Assistant Professor in the Departments of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is interested in mathematical modeling and scientific computation, particularly for interdisciplinary applications in science and engineering. He has recently been working on several projects relating to materials science, and since 2010 he has also been involved in the Physical Sciences in Oncology program, a pilot initiative to encourage multi-disciplinary cancer research. He obtained his PhD in Mathematics in 2007 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Martin Z. Bazant.

Website: http://math.berkeley.edu/~chr/