Title of Thesis: DEVELOPMENT OF A PROTOTYPE MAGNETOSTRICTIVE ENERGY HARVESTING DEVICE Mark Elliott Staley, Master of Science, 2005 Thesis directed by: Professor Alison B. Flatau Department of Aerospace Engineering To enhance performance and safety, structures of all types are made “smart” with the addition of sensors. These sensors require power, but in some cases conventional power supply meth...

The ‘‘pathological’’ energy function E(u) 5 u2 for u Þ 0, E(0) 5 1, has no minimizer. As u decreases to 0, the energy also decreases, but there is no way to achieve the value 0. Although examples like this might seem to be unimaginably far from scientific thought, they are at the heart of a new approach (1) to understand the complex microstructure and macroscopic response of materials that unde...