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Dream : Faculty : Material Design : Richard Cairncross
Richard Cairncross
Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering
PECASE, 1996
Modeling and Optimization of Non-conventional Materials
Paper has a complicated fibrous structure with fibers randomly oriented in the plane of the paper. Paper fibers are thick-walled tubes which collapse to a ribbon-like shape during drying; however, when re-wet, paper fibers can expand to a nearly cylindrical shape. The macroscopic deformation of paper and macroscopic transport properties are related to microscopic deformation of paper fibers, and a model is being developed to relate swelling and moisture transport on three scales: the fiber scale, the scale of a unit cell of the paper structure, and the macroscopic scale (see Fig. 10).
Example REU Project: In this project, the undergraduate student would perform experiments to determine the deformation and collapse of thick-walled tubes due to a pressure difference across the tube wall; some single-tube experiments have been completed by a summer undergraduate student at Drexel. The student would then construct an array of tubes and measure the deformation of the idealized structure under a variety of loading conditions and trans-mural pressures. The student would also become involved in experiments to measure the mechanical properties of tubes, fibers, and paper and would likely become involved with running and testing the numerical models that have been developed by graduate students.
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