Seminar on Dynamic Elastic Instability: Snap, crack and pop
Prof Dominic Vella University of Oxford, UK This seminar will be chaired by Prof Jimmy Hsia. |
| Seminar Abstract |
Elastic instabilities are ubiquitous in everyday life, from the wrinkling of skin to the rapid inversion of an umbrella. While understanding these patterns from a static point of view is now standard, their dynamics is more involved and is only now being uncovered. In this talk, I will discuss two specific examples for which we have made progress in recent years: dynamic buckling and elastic snap-through. These examples demonstrate the crucial role that the rate of loading plays in both how quickly instability occurs and the pattern that is ultimately observed. While these phenomena have analogues in physics (specifically critical slowing down near phase transitions and structure in the early universe), their presence in elastic instabilities may hint at new routes for the design and operation of engineering devices. |
| Speaker’s Biography |
Prof. Dominic Vella is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. After undergraduate study at Cambridge, a year at Harvard and a PhD back in Cambridge, Dominic worked in Paris as a post-doc supported by the Royal Commission of 1851. He returned briefly to Cambridge, before moving to Oxford to take up his current position in 2011. He works to develop mathematical models of a range of physical problems including floating objects (the 'Cheerios effect’), the wrinkling of thin elastic objects and snap-through instabilities. |