Division of ENGINEERING & APPLIED SCIENCE at Caltech

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GACLIT 75
Fall 2003

Ares Rosakis
Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering
Professor Rosakis’s research interests are in the mechanics of solids, dynamic failure, impact mechanics, and the reliability of
microelectronic components

These days, in addition to aeronautics,we have space applications,which are traditional to aeronautics, but we also have the micro and the nano worlds, which are full of solid mechanics and microfluidics problems, and then we have geophysics. In my own research, I started with the engineering scale,went to the large scale with geophysical research, and recently I have been working with very small length scales, in particular microelectronic components such as thin-film structures on flat substrates, interconnects, and optoelectronics—basically things that are baked on a wafer. These become microchips in your computer.We are concerned with how small we can make these components. It turns out there is a physical limit which is dictated not by the electronic performance, but by the strength of the thin-film materials.

Through the years I have investigated materials on many orders of magnitude: from microns to hundreds of kilometers. This really reflects the philosophy of GALCIT.Mechanics—whether its fluid mechanics, solid mechanics—is continuum mechanics. There are very powerful tools that we work with at all of these length scales. One of the biggest strengths of GALCIT both in the research and in the teaching of graduate students has been to lay down the fundamentals in mechanics. And it does not matter what the application is. The application could be aeronautical, it could be space, it could be geophysical, it could be everyday engineering, it could be microelectronics. But really the fundamental principles are the same.

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