The strength and durability of adhesively bonded sandwich structures often depend on the mechanisms of fracture, which in turn depend on the properties of the adhesive and the microstructures of the interface. When the thin adhesive layer is ductile, cavitation either within the layer or along the interface is often the dominant failure mechanism. In the present paper, fracture due to cavity gr...

Phase-field models provide a way to model fluid interfaces as having finite thickness; the interface between two immiscible fluids is treated as a thin mixing layer across which physical properties vary steeply but continuously. One of the main challenges of this approach is in resolving the sharp gradients at the interface. In this paper, moving finite-element methods are used to simulate inte...

Nanostructured metasurfaces offer unique capabilities for subwavelength control of optical waves. Based on this potential, a large number of metasurfaces have been proposed recently as alternatives to standard optical elements. In most cases, however, these elements suffer from large chromatic aberrations, thus limiting their usefulness for multiwavelength or broadband applications. Here, in or...

The present contribution deals with the numerical modeling of railway track-supporting systems-using coupled finite-infinite elements-to represent the near and distant field stress distribution, and also employing a thin layer interface element to account for the interfacial behavior between sleepers and ballast. To simulate the relative debonding, slipping and crushing at the contact area betw...

New phenomena arise in single-crystal semiconductors when these are fabricated in very thin sheets, with thickness at the nanometer scale. We review recent research on Si and Ge nanomembranes, including the use of elastic strain sharing, layer release, and transfer, that demonstrate new science and enable the fabrication of materials with unique properties. Strain engineering produces new strai...

We describe an electrochemistry-based technique to control and monitor the polymerisation of sickle-cell haemoglobin (HbS). The polymerisation was monitored as a change in turbidity during the depletion of oxygen in a small volume custom-built thin-layer electrochemical cell. The cell allowed the investigation of HbS polymerisation as a function of HbS concentration, temperature and solution pH...

We have studied effects of additive elements into the channel layers of amorphous IGZO TFTs on threshold voltage shift issues under light illumination stress condition. By addition of Hf or Si element, the Vth shift under light illumination and negative bias-temperature stress and illumination stress conditions was drastically suppressed while the switching operation of TFTs using IGZO with Mn ...

An optical multi-sensor system based on the excited-state lifetime of luminophore doped xerogels is described. The system is based on the novel concept of combining addressable surface-mount light-emitting diode (SM-LED) arrays with doped xerogel thin films; each SM-LED in the array is coated with a different xerogel-based sensor element. Each sensor element exhibits a unique response profile t...

This thesis is devoted to the study of the influence of a thin heterogeneous layer on the linear elastic behavior of a three-dimensional structure. Two types of heterogeneties are considered : cavities and elastic inclusions. For inclusions of high rigidty a further study was performed in the case of a heat conduction problem. A formal analysis using the matched asymptotic expansions method lea...

Multilayer thin-film PZT diaphragm has been designed and modeled. Commercial Finite element software, ANSYS was implemented to model the diaphragm. This multi-layer diaphragm can be used as both sensor and actuator. A simplified model is introduced to reduce the CPU time. Dynamic characteristics of the multilayer diaphragm have been investigated. The important parameters of the multilayer PZT d...