SVU Member Elected NAS Member

May 10, 2002

SVU PRESS RELEASE

SVU Member, Zdenek P. Bazant, W.P. Murphy Professor of Civil Engineering and Materials Science, was elected on April 30 a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) at the 139th annual meeting of the academy in Washington, D.C. This is his fourth academy membership, after his previous inductions to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Washington, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, and Academy of Engineering of Czech Republic, Prague.

This grand academic assembly, established in 1863 by an act of Congress signed by president Lincoln, currently has 1907 members, among which about 140 are also members of NAE. In the field of solid mechanics, the joint NAS-NAE members include J.D. Achenbach, R.W. Clough, S.H. Crandall, L.B. Freund, Y.-C.B. Fung, G.W. Housner, J.W. Hutchinson and J.R. Rice, an elite group now joined by Bazant whose main contribution to science is considered to be the scaling of failure in solid mechanics.

Last October, Bazant received from Politecnico di Milano his fourth honorary doctorate, after those from the Czech Technical University in Prague, Karlsruhe University, Germany, and University of Colorado, Boulder. Also, he recently received from ISI the award of a 'Highly Cited Scientist' , which is given to 250 most cited authors worldwide in engineering, all engineering fields combined (Bazant's works receive annually about 550 citations).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Until the 1980s, all the size effects on structural strength were generally attributed to material randomness. Bazant changed that. He revolutionized the scaling theory beginning with his 1984 discovery of the size effect caused by the energy release energy associated with large fractures. Introducing asymptotic matching arguments, he derived a deceptively simple law of surprisingly broad applicability, bridging the scaling laws of classical fracture mechanics and plasticity. With his assistants, Bažant experimentally verified his law for concrete, rocks, fiber composites, sea ice, toughened ceramics, cellular materials and snow slabs, and showed how to exploit it to identify material fracture characteristics from experiments. To make computer simulations exhibit the correct scaling, Bazant developed, beginning in 1976, the crack-band and nonlocal damage concepts now widely used in computations, and justified them by micromechanics of interacting cracks. Later, using extreme value statistics, he formulated a probabilistic generalization, including certain cases of transition to statistical size effect. He extended his theory to compression fracture, e.g. fiber kinking in composites and borehole breakout. Recently, similar asymptotic scaling arguments led him to improve the prevailing dislocation-based theory of metal plasticity on approach to nanoscale. Although Bazant also obtained significant results in structural stability, fracture, plasticity, damage mechanics, concrete creep and hygrothermal effects, and probabilistic mechanics, he is best known in science as a world leader in scaling research in solid mechanics.

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