Projects and key publications

The project started with a goal to develop a unified theory of nucleation and propagation of fracture in elastomers that can describe and predict some famed, but heretofore unexplained, experiments in natural and silicone rubber (related to a phenomenon called cavitation).

This work provided unexpected motivation to revisit the nucleation of fracture in brittle materials at large, not just elastomers, and led to a general model for nucleation and propagation of brittle fracture. More recently, it has provided motivation to revisit ductile fracture and cast it also in the same generalized framework.


Key publications:

The mechanics of how biological tissues respond to mechanical forces and adapt, grow and evolve is not well understood. The goal is to constitutively define these evolutions in a suitable mechanics framework. Along with colleague Prof. Arash Yavari, we have proposed a new variational approach to explain of remodeling of collagen fibers in soft tissues. More recently, we are working on understanding arterial growth with the same variational framework.

Key publications:

The goal is to describe the macroscopic viscoelastic behavior of polymeric composites directly in terms of the behavior of its microscopic constituents. As a first step, we developed a two-potential framework for nonlinear viscoelasticity to unify various constitutive models in the literature. A model coming out of this framework is now widely used. The viscoelasticity framework is also being used now to investigate fracture in ultra-soft materials like hydrogels and biological tissues, supported by NSF.


Key publications:

Front polymerization is an energy- and time-efficient way of curing polymers and polymeric composites that has opened up new avenues into advanced manufacturing. The goal of this project is to develop rigorous non-linear multi-physics models and supporting theory that can aid the manufacturing process.


Key publications: