Even such seemingly different materials like wood and sandstone share similarities: both are porous and exhibit hysteretic behavior upon water uptake and evaporation, i.e., their properties depend not only on the current state of the materials, but on the history of state changes. Both materials are examples for strongly-coupled elastic-fluid systems which are ruled by the interplay between the moisture content and the mechanical stress field. Porous materials which exhibit hysteresis are becoming increasingly important for carbon sequestration, multifunctional materials design and mechanical control of surface catalysis. The book contains experimental investigations which cover diverse coupled elastic-fluid systems on the micro-meso and on the macro scale. This is complemented by modelling studies to foster the understanding of the experimentally observed phenomena. The book benefits both experimentalists and theoreticians alike and connects knowledge from research areas across traditional discipline boundaries.
About the Author
Dr H. Alicia Kim is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bath, UK and an affiliate at the Earth and Environmental Sciences Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory. She received her PhD degree in Aeronautical Engineering, University of Sydney, Australia in 2001. Her research expertise includes numerical methods of finite element formulation and their applications in nonlinear hysteretic materials and optimisation of aerospace structures. She has authored more than 12 international publications.
Professor Robert Guyer received his PhD degree from Cornell University in 1966. He is the author of more than 200 refereed journal articles. His area of expertise includes transport in disordered systems, quantum crystals, nonlinear elasticity, granular media as well as time reversal methods in geophysics. In addition to his career at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) he has had appointments at Research Center Julich, Harvard, U of Toronto, U of Florida, Cornell, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and in several industrial research labs.
