PhD student Hyoung Suk Suh passed the qualification exam. His work is on modeling the thawing and freezing of frozen porous media. In the proposal talk, Hyoung Suk introduces the mathematical framework requires to simulate the freezing and thawing of porous media at the pore scale (see the rehearsal Youtube Video below). 

I am excited to announce that our PhD student Eric Bryant has successfully defended his dissertation "Capturing Evolving Size-Dependent Anisotropy from Brittle Fracture to Plasticity for Geological Materials" and will join Los Alamos National Laboratory as postdoc research associate. His primary appointment will be with the fluid dynamics and solid mechanics group of the Theoretical Division (T-3).

During his tenure in the Sun research group, Eric has been awarded the Presidential Fellowship and the Guggenheim Fellowship. His PhD work focuses on modeling the size effect of evolving anisotropy of fracture and plastic deformation. Traditionally, one may introduce scaling law to incorporate how shear and tensile strengths depend on the size of the specimen. In his work, the main focus is also to investigate how does the rotation among the principal directions of the elastic strain, tensorial internal variables and stress tensor evolves across length scales and during the deformation process. He is the authors of 4 journal articles and one manuscript very close to completion. Among them, three of them published in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, and one in International Journal of Fracture as listed below. 

Congratulations, Eric! 

Published work:

1. A. Qinami, E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, M. Kaliske, Circumventing mesh bias via r-and h-adaptive refinement techniques for the variational eigenfracture model, International Journal of Fracture, doi:10.1007/s10704-019-00349-x, ​2019. 
2. E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, Mixed-mode phase field fracture for secondary cracks in isotropic and anisotropic brittle rocks with consistent kinematics, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, doi:10.1016/j.cma.2018.08.008, 2018. [PDF]
3. E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, micromorphic-regularized anisotropic Cam-clay-type model for capturing size-dependent anisotropy, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, doi:10.1016/j.cma.2019.05.003, 2019. 
4. S. Na, E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, A configurational force for adaptive re-meshing of gradient-enhanced poromechanics problems with history-dependent variables, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, doi:10.1016/j.cma.2019.112572, 2019. [PDF]
5. E.C. Bryant, W.C. Sun, ​Phase field modeling of frictional slip with slip weakening/strengthening  under non-isothermal conditions, in preparation.