Achievement

Third-year Trainee Cynthia Zingale is studying dynamic failure of brittle materials such as cement and ceramics. Her work has combined expertise from IGERT faculty in Civil Engineering (her home department), Mechanical Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering. In particular, she has worked with a model that identifies stress-strain relations based on the assumption that failure arises from pre-existing flaws in the material. With this model in hand, she initiated a new collaboration with Prof. Hanan at Oklahoma State University. Using ceramic samples supplied by researchers at Army Research Labs, Cynthia has asked Prof. Hanan to use x-ray tomography to quantify the number and sizes of flaws within each sample, which are being used as model input. The samples are currently undergoing high-strain-rate experiments in a Kolsky bar setup at Johns Hopkins. Cynthia will then compare the results of her model with those obtained from the experiments.