Achievement

Cynthia Byer defended her dissertation in April 2013 and will formally graduate with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in Fall 2013. Her dissertation focused on understanding size effects in magnesium using both experimental characterization and statistical analyses. As part of this work she visited the National University of Singapore in a collaboration to implement a user subroutine into her finite element model. She was able to achieve good agreement between her experimentally obtained data and the simulation results using an ABAQUS FEM user subroutine (capturing both strengthening effects, as well as stochasticity). She has submitted a paper that has been accepted in Acta Materialia on experimental results relating the initial dislocation density to size effects. On July 1, she started a technical support position with the Department of Defense.