9423964 Huang The International Junior Investigator and Postdoctoral Fellows Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a five-month postdoctoral research visit by Dr. Yonggang Young Huang to work with Drs. Wei Yang and Keh-Chih Hwang of Tsinghua University in the People's Republic of China. Funding for this project will come from the East Asia-Pacific Program. This collaboration between Dr. Huang and Tsinghua University is designed to increase our fundamental understanding of micromechanics issues in electronic packaging and in constitutive modeling of "intelligent materials," plus advance the optimum design of reliable electronic packaging. The specific objectives of the project are: 1) To study the failure mechanisms of conductive adhesives over the full temperature range, with emphasis on highly constrained failure; 2) To study the interface degradation mechanisms of conductive adhesives due to thermal fatigue, with emphasis on defect evolution under thermal cycling; and 3) To model ferroelectric materials, with special focus on the relation between microscale phenomena and macroscopic properties. ***
