The most exciting role of experimental mechanics is in discovery ‚Äì the uncovering and understanding of phenomena. Such discovery experiments require careful attention both to the design of experiments and to the development of appropriate tools for diagnostics. Of course, the basic ideas go all the way back to Galileo. In this presentation, I will describe three examples of this process through clean experiments related to constitutive and failure behavior of materials: (i) dynamic strain localization and fragmentation under high strain-rate loading in ductile materials; (ii) multiscale experiments on damage nucleation and failure under quasistatic loading in polycrystalline metallic materials; (iii) nucleation and growth of cavities and cracks in elastomers. 

Exploring the mechanical behavior of materials through experiments

The Virtual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Science 2020 is the first fully virtual meeting of the SES community to envision and connect during the hiatus created by Covid-19, providing a platform for the exchange of ideas, and to showcase the latest research in the field of engineering science.

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