Three Named ASME Fellows

This April, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) elected three MechSE professors to the grade of ASME Fellow: Professor K. Jimmy Hsia, Professor Petros Sofronis and Professor Daniel Tortorelli. ASME Fellows are elected based on significant engineering achievements and contributions to the engineering profession.

Professor Hsia's research contributions to the understanding of materials deformation and reliability have led to a broad range of industrial applications. He has actively promoted science and education both within and outside the University of Illinois through scientific publications, service as a visiting scientist, interactions with industry, establishing new educational programs and summer schools, service on editorial boards, and organization of symposium at high-profile scientific meetings. As Founding Program Director of the Nano and Bio Mechanics Program in Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF), Professor Hsia laid the foundations for a program that rejuvenated applied mechanics as a viable field in the context of interdisciplinary research and led to new directions in the field. In 2007, he was the principal organizer of the NSF-funded workshop on "the Cell as a Machine." The workshop drew more than 40 academic experts in engineering and biology and nearly 20 experts from various federal funding agencies to discuss future research and educational directions and opportunities in the interdisciplinary area of biology and engineering at the cellular level.

Professor Sofronishas significantly advanced the understanding of the way hydrogen degrades materials and has helped to explain the fundamental causes of material failures-a problem that is central to designing safe and reliable infrastructure for the hydrogen economy, nuclear reactors and high-performance jet engines. Specifically, he has developed models and methodologies that enhance scientists' ability to predict the macroscopic behavior of powder aggregates, solid propellants and composite materials under various temperature and load conditions based on deformation processes and densifications that occur at the microscale. He has helped ASME develop codes and standards for the safe and reliable transport and storage of hydrogen fuel, collaborated with NASA on the engineering-fracture aspects of hydrogen embrittlement in materials for the Space Shuttle's main engine, and worked with the ExxonMobil corporation on hydrogen embrittlement of materials to be used for oil exploration in the arctic circle. He has taught and improved virtually every solid mechanics course MechSE offers and raised the bar with respect to solid mechanics knowledge for numerous graduate students both inside and outside the department, while strengthening the university's overall reputation for producing quality students.

Professor Tortorellihas made groundbreaking contributions to design sensitivity analysis, structural optimization and process optimization that have had a major impact on research in those fields. At the same time, he has made significant contributions to extant material behavior, computation mechanics, multibody dynamics, continuum mechanics and controls. He developed a systematic means to derive computationally efficient sensitivity expressions for a variety of transient nonlinear systems using both direct and adjoint methods. His work in this area included second-order sensitivity expressions and shape sensitivities where clear connections were made between the material derivative and domain parameterization. Similarly, his research contributions in optimization, inverse/identification studies and reliability analysis have substantially improved the design field. The structural shape optimization tool he developed in 1997 was the forerunner to the modeling tool used in the commercial software Pro/E today. His technique, which combined a fixed mesh with a geometric modeler, changed requirements for object mesh generation. He later applied the topology optimization capability to eliminate the meshing and reintroduction of elements in the growing field of MEMS. His efficient sensitivity algorithms have been used to optimize a wide range of engineering process that include casting, crystal growth, welding and polymer extrusion processes.