MMAE Seminar - Dr. David Srolovitz - Grand Unified Theory of Grain Boundaries

Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. David Srolovitz, Joseph Bordogna Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Departments of Materials Science and Engineering & Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at University of Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, March 30th to present his lecture, Grand Unified Theory of Grain Boundaries. This seminar is a part of Midwest Mechanics Series.

Abstract

Grain boundaries do it all. They transmit stresses, they move under the action of an applied stress, they migrate when curved, they slide, they roughen, they transmit/absorb/emit dislocations, ... They are central to the mechanical behavior of polycrystalline materials. They behave differently at low temperature and high temperature, with different grain misorientations, with different inclinations, ... I will present a bicrystallography-based model of grain boundaries that rationalizes much of the known grain boundary property phenomenology within a single coherent picture. The ultimate goal is, to paraphrase Albert Einstein, "to make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler". Like the other grand unified theory, we're getting closer, but ...

Biography

David Srolovitz is the author of well over 450 papers on topics in materials theory and simulations ranging from defects (surfaces, grain boundaries, dislocations, point defects), microstructure evolution (grain growth, dislocations, stress effects, phase transformations), deformation (nanomaterials, dislocation motion, creep), and film growth (sputtering, evaporation, CVD) and has an h-index of 75 with more than 20,000 literature citations. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of MRS, TMS, ASM, Institute of Physics and is the winner of the 2013 MRS Materials Theory Award. Srolovitz did his undergraduate work in Physics at Rutgers University and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a staff member at Exxon Corporate Research and Los Alamos National Laboratory early in his career and then was professor at the University of Michigan (Materials Science and Applied Physics), Princeton University (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Applied Mathematics), and the University of Pennsylvania (Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics), where he is currently the Joseph Bordogna Professor of Engineering and Applied Science and Director of the Penn Institute for Computational Science.