This is a past event.

ME-EM Graduate Seminar Speaker Series

proudly presents:

Dr. Trisha Sain
Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics
Michigan Technological University

Abstract: Polymers have found wide range of applications these days in a variety of industries. One of the major technical challenges in processing of polymers is curing or polymerization, through which the liquid polymer transitions into a state of 3D solid. The crosslinking reactions that occur during the curing process results in a phase transition within the polymer. The process is heavily dependent on environmental conditions such as temperature, intensity of heat/light used for curing, which eventually affect the constitutive response of the final cured product. In addition to that, the curing process comes along with a volume shrinkage as the crosslinks begin to form and thereby shrinkage induced stresses within the material. In the present work, we have proposed a thermodynamically consistent and frame indifferent cure constitutive model for thermosetting polymers undergoing curing. The constitutive models are based on a finite deformation setting considering cure dependent shrinkage and thermal expansion as stress/deformation producing components. The models are implemented in general purpose finite element code ABAQUS and several numerical simulations are performed to analyze the model predictions.

Bio: Dr. Trisha Sain is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engg.-Engg. Mechanics at Michigan Tech since 2016. Prior joining to MTU she had been an Assistant Professor in North Carolina A & T State University. She had worked as post-doctoral researcher in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2011-2013). She received her Ph.D. in Civil Engg. from Indian Institute of Science, India in 2008. She then moved to Barcelona, Spain in Universidad Politecnic De Catalunya in International Center for Numerical Methods in Engg. (CIMNE) for pursuing her postdoc in 2009-2011. Her research focuses on computational modeling and design of novel materials, biomechanics, constitutive modeling, mechanics of polymeric materials.