RESEARCH

My research interests are in the broad area of the Mechanics of Solid Materials. Through the integration of analytical modeling, computational simulation and experiment, the overarching goal of my research is to reveal the multi-scale and multi-physics mechanisms in diverse materials undergoing large deformation, fatigue, or fracture, and to apply these findings to the development of new theoretical models and experimental methods for the prediction of coupled response, fatigue behavior, and crack propagation. My research works mainly center on three topics: Rapid Fatigue Evaluation, Mechanisms-Based Constitutive Modeling, and Fracture Mechanics of Soft Elastomers.

Conclusions

My research holds a unique place in the field of solid mechanics since special attention is put on thermodynamics, involving free energy, intrinsic dissipation, entropy generation, etc. As known to us, thermodynamics provides the universal laws that all physical and mechanical behaviors of materials should obey. Viewing problems from the thermodynamics aspect may help us find the clues to uncovering the hidden mechanisms and the key to establishing the constitutive models. But unfortunately, this point has not been adequately appreciated by many other researchers. In all my studies, thermodynamics has always been serving as a significant role. For example, in fatigue life prediction, the failure process is considered an irreversible thermodynamic process, and intrinsic dissipation is adopted as a fatigue damage indicator. In the constitutive modeling, all the proposed models are formulated within a rigorous thermodynamic framework, no matter on the microscale or macroscale, and when dealing with energy dissipation a generalized thermodynamic force is utilized to drive the non-equilibrium evolution process. In the study of fracture mechanics, an energetic fracture criterion is established to accommodate the viscoelastic dissipation and the intrinsic fracture dissipation.

At this point in my career, I hope to continue my research in the thermo-mechanics of solid materials. The potential funding sponsors include but are not limited to the National Science Foundation, United States Department of Energy, Office of Naval Research, Sandia National Laboratories, and 3M Corporation. Meanwhile, I also hope to extend my research to more frontier research areas and look forward to collaborating with researchers in other disciplines such as chemical engineering, materials science, and biomedical engineering.