Jerome B. Cohen Professor of Engineering
Chair, Mechanical Engineering Department
Secondary appointment, Materials Science and Engineering

BS, Engineering Science and Mechanics, 1985, Va Tech
MS, Applied Mechanics, 1986, Caltech
PhD, Applied Mechanics, 1990, Caltech

Contact Info

Research Website

 

Mechanics of Advanced Materials

     Professor Brinson's research interests lie in the study of advanced material systems and developing new methods to characterize and to model material behavior. Advanced materials can be defined as those that synergistically combine advantages of two or more materials (multiphase polymers and composites); materials that act as both control elements and structural elements (such as piezoelectrics, shape memory alloys, or magnetostrictive materials); microstructurally designed material systems (e.g., micorporous alloys and hierarchically reinforced nanocomposite systems). The technological advantages of these materials over traditional materials ultimately stem from particular microstructural or molecular properties. These distinct properties provide interesting challenges for experimental analysis and constitutive descriptions, so that many traditional concepts of deformation, fracture and failure must be reassessed. The objective of Professor Brinson's research is to characterize and model advanced materials systems, at scales spanning the range of molecular interactions, micromechanical and macroscopic behavior.

    Specific current and future interests include continued work with the constitutive modelling of shape memory alloys, aging in polymeric based systems, nanomechanics of nanotube reinforced polymers, and investigation of microstructure effects on properties of microporous materials for bioengineering. The research encompasses analytical, numerical and experimental investigation. Analytical micromechanics methods, finite element simulations of scanned material microstructures, and results from molecular level simulations are combined with continuum mechanics techniques to provide microstructurally based prediction of macroscopic environmental-mechanical response. On the experimental side, smaller scale testing includes optical and electron microscopy of samples with in situ loading, for example examining reorientation of martensitic variants with applied load in shape memory alloys. Macroscopic scale testing of samples in environmentally controlled chambers are also performed and the results of experiments are used to refine and better define models for advanced materials.

Associations and Awards

Fellow, Society for Engineering Science, 2007

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 2006-07

National Materials Advisory Board member, Jan. 2005 - Dec. 2007

ASME Special Achievement Award for Young Investigators, Applied Mechanics Division, 2003.

President of the Society of Engineering Science, 1999; Vice-President, 1998

DSSG - Defense Science Study Group, Institute for Defense Analysis, 1998-2000

NSF CAREER Award, 1995-99 ASEE

New Mechanics Educator Award, 1995

Selected Publications

Liu, H; Brinson, L.C., A Hybrid Numerical-Analytical Method for Modeling the Viscoelastic Properties of the Polymeric Nanocomposites, Journal of Applied Mechanics, vol. 73 (5) pp. 758-768 (2006).

D. Burton, X. Gao, L. C. Brinson, Finite element simulation of a self-healing shape memory alloy composite, Mechanics of Materials vol. 38, pp. 525-537 (2006).

T. Ramanathan, H. Liu and L. C. Brinson, Functionalized SWNT polymer nanocomposites for dramatic property improvement, J. Poly. Sci.: Polym. Phys., v. 43, pp. 2269-2279 (2005).

Spoerke, E.D., N.G. Murray, H. Li, C.L. Brinson, D.C. Dunand and S.I. Stupp, Organoapatite-Titanium Foam:  A Bioactive Composite for Orthopedic Tissue Engineering, Acta Biomaterialia, 1 (5): 523-533, (2005).

L. C. Brinson, I. Schmidt, R. Lammering, Micro and Macromechanical Investigations of Transformation Behavior of a Polycrystalline NiTi Shape Memory Alloy Using in situ Optical Microscopy, J. Mech. Physics of Solids, vol. 52:7, pp. 1549-1571 (2004).