Subrata Mukherjee

Professor

Professional Biography

After completeing his Ph.D., Mukherjee worked for a year as an engineer for Cartridge Television in San Jose, California, and for a year as a research associate at Stanford University. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1974. Since then, he has been a visiting faculty member at the University of Waterloo in Canada, at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany (under a grant from the Deutsche Forschungs-Gemeinschaft), at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and at the École Polytechnique, in Palaiseau, France. He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and of the American Academy of Mechanics and a member of the Society of Engineering Science, the International Association for Computational Mechanics and Sigma Xi. He has authored or co-authored three books, eleven invited review articles and over one hundred and sixty articles in archival journals. He has supervised twenty-three Cornell Ph.D.s. He is an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Applied Mechanics and a co-editor of International Journal of Multiscale and Interactive Mechanics (to be launched in 2006).

Research Interests

Professor Mukherjee has extensive research experience in linear and nonlinear computational mechanics, with primary emphasis on the applications of the boundary element and finite element methods (BEM and FEM). Over the years, he and his research collaborators (primarily his graduate students), have solved problems related to metal creep and fracture, manufacturing process (such as extrusion, sheet metal forming, quenching and casting) modeling and design, simulation and design of the diamond anvil cell and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). He has recently pioneered the development of a meshless method called the boundary node method (BNM). He has contributed to the advancement of integral equation methods in many areas - some of which are the first BEM formulations for elasto-viscoplasticity and for large-strain large-rotation problems, sensitivity analysis and optimization for physically nonlinear problems, and development of the boundary contour and boundary node methods (BCM and BNM).

Mukherjee’s current research interests are focused on two areas: simulation of MEMS and nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS)and development of meshless methods. He and his graduate students are interested in computer simulation (both quasi-static and dynamic), as well as optimal design (inverse problems) related to MEM and NEM structures. Such simulation and design typically requires coupling of the BEM with the finite element method (FEM).

Meshless methods, in various forms, are of great current interest to the computational mechanics community. The goal here is to greatly simplify the discretization process required for obtaining computaional solutions of three-dimensional (3-D) problems of complex shape. Mukherjee and his group have recently pioneered the BNM which combines the dimensional advantage of the BEM with diffuse interpolation carried out with moving least squares (MLS) interpolants. The result is that one only needs points on the bounding surface of a body to interpolate the desired solution, together with unstructured surface cells for integration. Problems of interest are 3-D potential theory, linear elasticity and fracture mechanics, as well as adaptive meshing with the BNM.

An ongoing project is concerned with the dynamical behavior of Carbon nanotubes (CNTs). CNTs possess remarkable properties. They are very stiff and very strong, yet ductile. They can be conducting or semiconducting, depending on their chirality. Possible applications of CNTs include diverse areas such as conductive and high strength composites, energy storage and conversion devices, sensors, field emission displays and radiation sources, nanometer sized semiconductor devices, probes and interconnects. This project is concerned with a fundamental modeling, numerical and experimental study of the dynamical response of carbon nanotubes.

The primary objectives of this project are:

• To propose a hierarchical modeling approach in which standard continuum mechanics, enriched continuum mechanics and molecular dynamics are being used to study the dynamical response of CNTs.
• To measure natural frequencies and quality factors of suspended nanotubes experimentally. Measured values are being compared with simulations based on the different models described above. The first successful experiments that measure natural frequencies of CNTs have been recently carried out by Professor McEuen's group at Cornell.
• To build nanoscale devices such as tunable high frequency oscillators, transistors and ultrasensitive mass and force transducers.