Research Interests
Professor McMeeking's current research interests concern mechanics
and electromechanics of materials. A major activity is constitutive
modeling of materials and computational simulation of materials
response. In addition, he is interested in fracture, fatigue and
failure of advanced composite materials as well as their deformation
and their physical properties such as heat transfer. One class of
materials he is working on right now is ferroelectric ceramics in
which electromechanical interactions are predominant.
He has produced effective constitutive models for ferroelectric
switching in such materials and addressed fundamental issues in
the interaction of electric fields with cracks. Another type of
material that he is involved with is ceramic matrix composites with
porous matrices for high temperature applications. The damage tolerance
in these systems is due to the matrix porosity and he is working
on computational simulations to understand the fundamental reasons
for the good strength and toughness of these materials. In these
and other composite systems, the reinforcement material comes in
the form of a textile of carbon or ceramic tows. He is very active
currently on developing computational models for the linear and
nonlinear mechanics of composites containing such textile reinforcements
and these methods are now being used in commercial computer codes.
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