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John W. Rudnicki (born August 12, 1951, in Huntington, West Virginia) is an American engineering professor. [1]
Rudnicki studied at Brown University Mechanics from 1969 with a bachelor's degree in 1973, a master's degree in 1974, and a doctorate in solid-state mechanics with James R. Rice in 1977. He was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in geophysics at Caltech.
Dr. John Rudnicki's research interest includes Inelastic behavior and failure of geomaterials, particularly deformation instabilities in brittle rocks and granular media, including their interactions with pore fluids, with applications to fault instability, quantification of energy radiation from earthquakes and environment- and resource-related geomechanics. From 1978 to 1981 he was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and from 1981 onwards associate professor at Northwestern University, where he received a full professorship for mechanics, environmental engineering and civil engineering in 1990.
He dealt in particular with the mechanics of geomaterials, especially local deformations such as the influence of local heating caused by deformation caused by friction and pore water during warping. Applications that he investigated include carbon dioxide storage in rock, energy storage and recovery, toxic waste storage, and earthquakes. From 2005 to 2010 he was one of the consultants of the Southern California Earthquake Center. From 1997 to 2010 he was a member (and chairman from 2008 to 2010) of the Geoscience Panel at the United States Department of Energy.
In 2006, he received the Maurice A. Biot Medal (for his fundamental contributions to the theory of porous media and application in rock mechanics and geophysics), [2] in 2008 the Brown Engineering Alumni Medal, in 2011 the Daniel C. Drucker Medal [3] and in 2013 the Caterpillar Prize for his paper "A multiscale DEM-LBM analysis on permeability evolutions inside a dilatant shear band" (co-authored with WaiChing Sun and Matthew Kuhn). In 2014, John Rudnicki received the Engineering Science Medal from the Society of Engineering Science (SES). [4] A special symposium was organized by K. T. Chau at Purdue University during the annual conference of SES. [5] In 1977 he received a prize for outstanding research in rock mechanics around the national US committee for rock mechanics. [6] He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
In 2014, he published the book "Fundamentals of Continuum Mechanics" [7] by Wiley.
Soil liquefaction occurs when a cohesionless saturated or partially saturated soil substantially loses strength and stiffness in response to an applied stress such as shaking during an earthquake or other sudden change in stress condition, in which material that is ordinarily a solid behaves like a liquid. In soil mechanics, the term "liquefied" was first used by Allen Hazen in reference to the 1918 failure of the Calaveras Dam in California. He described the mechanism of flow liquefaction of the embankment dam as:
If the pressure of the water in the pores is great enough to carry all the load, it will have the effect of holding the particles apart and of producing a condition that is practically equivalent to that of quicksand... the initial movement of some part of the material might result in accumulating pressure, first on one point, and then on another, successively, as the early points of concentration were liquefied.
Romesh C. Batra is a University Distinguished Professor and Clifton C. Garvin Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia. He was born in Village Dherowal, Punjab, India. His family migrated from Dherowal to Shahabad Markanda, Haryana, India after India became an independent country. Dr. Batra has authored the book, Elements of Continuum Mechanics, AIAA Educational Series. His research group has published in reputable refereed and widely read journals more than 460 papers of which about 40 are single-authored and nearly 320 have two authors; these are documented on the website: http://www.beam.vt.edu/batra.
Poromechanics is a branch of physics and specifically continuum mechanics and acoustics that studies the behaviour of fluid-saturated porous media. A porous medium or a porous material is a solid referred to as matrix) permeated by an interconnected network of pores (voids) filled with a fluid. Usually both solid matrix and the pore network, or pore space, are assumed to be continuous, so as to form two interpenetrating continua such as in a sponge. Natural substances including rocks, soils, biological tissues including heart and cancellous bone, and man-made materials such as foams and ceramics can be considered as porous media. Porous media whose solid matrix is elastic and the fluid is viscous are called poroelastic. A poroelastic medium is characterised by its porosity, permeability as well as the properties of its constituents.
Maurice Anthony Biot was a Belgian-American applied physicist. He made contributions in thermodynamics, aeronautics, geophysics, earthquake engineering, and electromagnetism. Particularly, he was accredited as the founder of the theory of poroelasticity.
Poroelasticity is a field in materials science and mechanics that studies the interaction between fluid flow and solids deformation within a linear porous medium and it is an extension of elasticity and porous medium flow. The deformation of the medium influences the flow of the fluid and vice versa. The theory was proposed by Maurice Anthony Biot as a theoretical extension of soil consolidation models developed to calculate the settlement of structures placed on fluid-saturated porous soils. The theory of poroelasticity has been widely applied in geomechanics, hydrology, biomechanics, tissue mechanics, cell mechanics, and micromechanics.
Bernard Budiansky was an American scholar in the field of applied mechanics, and made seminal contributions to the mechanics of structures and mechanics of materials. He was a recipient of the Timoshenko Medal.
The Daniel C. Drucker medal was instituted in 1997 by the Applied Mechanics Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The Drucker Medal is conferred in recognition of distinguished contributions to the fields of applied mechanics and mechanical engineering. The award is given in honor of Daniel C. Drucker, who was internationally known for contributions to the theory of plasticity and its application to analysis and design in metal structures. The recipient is given a medal and an honorarium.
Alan Needleman is a professor of materials science & engineering at Texas A&M University. Prior to 2009, he was Florence Pirce Grant University Professor of Mechanics of Solids and Structures at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Zdeněk Pavel Bažant is McCormick School Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil Engineering and Materials Science in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University's Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Daniel Charles Drucker was American civil and mechanical engineer and academic, who served as president of the Society for Experimental Stress Analysis in 1960–1961, as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in the year 1973–74, and as president of the American Academy of Mechanics in 1981–82.
James Robert Rice is an American engineer, scientist, geophysicist, and Mallinckrodt Professor of Engineering Sciences and Geophysics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences,.
The Theodore von Karman Medal in Engineering Mechanics is awarded annually to an individual in recognition of his distinguished achievement in engineering mechanics, applicable to any branch of civil engineering. This award was established and endowed in 1960 in honor of Theodore von Kármán by the Engineering Mechanics Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
Ioannis Vardoulakis was an eminent scientist who is known for his major contributions in the modeling of geomaterials, geo-hazards and geotechnical processes. He was the pioneer of the bifurcation theory of geomechanics, which has led to a better understanding of the long-standing problem of mesh-dependency in the Finite Element Modeling. He also contributed to the enriched continuum modeling, which allowed for the first time the constitutive modeling of shear bands and worked extensively in experimental geomechanics, having developed ingenious devices to test geomaterials.
Pressure grouting or jet grouting involves injecting a grout material into otherwise inaccessible but interconnected pore or void space of which neither the configuration or volume are known, and is often referred to simply as grouting. The grout may be a cementitious, resinous, or solution chemical mixture. The greatest use of pressure grouting is to improve geomaterials. The purpose of grouting can be either to strengthen a formation or to reduce water flow through it. It is also used to correct faults in concrete and masonry structures. Since first usage in the 19th century, grouting has been performed on the foundation of virtually every one of the world's large dams, in order to reduce the amount of leakage through the rock, and sometimes to strengthen the foundation to support the weight of the overlying structure, be it of concrete, earth, or rock fill. It is also a key procedure in the creation of post-tensioned prestressed concrete, a material used in many concrete bridge designs, among other places.
Ares J. Rosakis, Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He was also the fifth Director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, known as (GALCIT), and formerly known as Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, and was the Otis Booth Leadership Chair, of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science.
The William Prager Medal is an award given annually by the Society of Engineering Science (SES) to an individual for "outstanding research contributions in either theoretical or experimental Solid Mechanics or both". This medal was established in 1983. The actual award is a medal with William Prager's likeness on one side and an honorarium of USD 2000.
Yonggang Huang is the Jan and Marcia Achenbach Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University.
Henry Louis Langhaar was a mathematician, engineer, researcher, educator, and author in the field of engineering mechanics. In 1978, he retired as Professor Emeritus, after 31 years in the Department of Theoretical & Applied Mechanics (TAM) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Lallit Anand is the Warren and Towneley Rohsenow Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research focuses on solid mechanics and large deformation plasticity theory. He has received numerous awards and accolades for his significant contributions to the field of applied mechanics and mechanical engineering.
Nadia Lapusta is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. She designed the first computational model that could accurately and efficiently simulate sequence of earthquakes and interseismic slow deformation on a planar fault in a single consistent physical framework.