Title:

The Mechanics of Soft Materials: Fully Variational Constitutive Models with Applications in Traumatic Brain Injuries and Impact Mitigation

Speaker:

Dr. Tamer El Sayed

Affiliation:

Mechanical Engineering, King Abdullah University of Sciences and Technology (KAUST)

When:

Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 3:00:00 PM   Add to Calendar

Where:

MRDC Building, Room 4211

Host:

Arash Yavari
arash.yavari@ce.gatech.edu
404-894-2436

Abstract

Soft materials such as polymers and biological tissues have several engineering and biomechanical applications. These materials exhibit complex mechanical characteristics and the need to accurately predict their behavior has posed a tremendous challenge for scientists and engineers. In this talk, I shall present fully variational constitutive models capable of capturing several complex mechanical characteristics exhibited by such materials. Application to traumatic brain injury (TBI) under impact/acceleration loading will be presented. Clinically observed brain damage is reproduced and a predictive capability of the distribution, intensity, and reversibility/irreversibility of brain tissue damage will be demonstrated. Another application to ballistic impact on a polyurea retrofitted DH36 steel plate is simulated and validated, and computational capability for assessing the blast performance of metal/elastomer composite shells will also be presented. Future directions of this work may lead to the formulation of head-injury criteria for medical, governmental, and industrial applications; addressing the definition of clinical-biomechanical injury thresholds and tolerances; the simulation of a wide range of injuries, including blast-induced TBI and the effects of growing tumors; and the design and assessment of effective protective devices.

Biography

Dr. Tamer El Sayed is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at KAUST. His work is involved with formulating multi-scale constitutive models for metals and soft materials for the purpose of predicting their damage behavior under dynamic loading. As a graduate student at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), he received a first place award in the material-modeling category of the student presentation competition at the 9th United States Congress on Computational Mechanics. In 2007, he was appointed as a Postdoctoral Scholar at Caltech in the Graduate Aeronautical laboratories where he established computational capability to determine ballistic-critical-impact-velocities on polymer-reinforced composite structures and formulated constitutive models for soft materials. His work also focused on the formulation of highly predictive computational models for head trauma that can aid in understanding the physiological dysfunctions associated with traumatic brain injuries.

Notes

Refreshments will be served.