This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) proposal is concerned with the creation of a new breed of computational solid mechanics tools based on embedding the solid geometry in arbitrary meshes, known as immersed boundary methods. The transition from the description of a structural component to a numerical model is more-often-than-not the bottleneck that hinders analysis from becoming an integral part of the design cycle. The first outcome of this proposal is a comprehensive set of tools that streamlines the path from a geometric description containing structural components such as solids and shells to the analysis of its mechanical performance. The second contribution emanates from an application of these tools to study the dynamic mechanical behavior of cracks driven by a pressurized fluid.
The outcome of this work provides solutions to problems common to health, industrial and homeland security applications, and an explicit effort will be made to transfer the new tools to interested parties in the scientific, defense or industrial areas. Fluid-driven cracks are of interest to the energy and mining industries for their implications on oil and gas reservoir management, and in carbon sequestration, a promising technique to ameliorate global warming. A comprehensive educational plan is proposed, whose central idea is to foster science interest at middle school, with an estimated impact of 30,000 children. The plan revolves around training middle school teachers in exciting aspects of nanotechnology and computation through a summer school, and in collaborating with its alumni to shape the content of a program of hands?on lectures for the students.
