Prof. David M Parks

Mechanical behavior of engineering materials forms a central theme of research interest. Material-specific mechanisms of deformation and failure motivate the development of novel continuum constitutive models that are incorporated within finite-element codes to explore initial boundary-value problems of interest at both macroscopic and microstructural scales. Recent topics of particular interest include ductile failure of high- strength steels under low stress triaxiality, mechanics of hardness in ultrahard ceramic coatings, strain-induced crystallization and melting in natural rubber, and effects of lattice strain on low-temperature phonon-mediated superconductivity.