Kaushik Bhattacharya
Professor of Mechanics and Materials Science; Executive Officer for Mechanical Engineering

B. Tech., Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, 1986; Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1991

1200 East California Boulevard
Pasadena, CA 91125
MC 104-44

(626) 395-8306

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Research

The primary research interest of Professor Bhattacharya is to apply the methods and concepts of mechanics to generate ideas for the design, development, and creation of new materials and the optimization of materials processing. Virtually every material contains features that are different at different length scales. For example, even the simplest piece of metal is typically made up of many crystallites (grains), which in turn are made up of many atoms. This complexity is compounded in sophisticated modern materials. Macroscopic applied loads and fields affect the microscopic structure; conversely, the microscopic structure affects the macroscopic behavior. Therefore, bridging length scales is a key theme, and this is addressed in a variety of materials and materials systems, typically using the recently developed "weak-convergence methods."

Much recent research has focused on active materials including shape-memory alloys, ferroelectrics and electro-active polymers. We have identified critical criteria in the crystallography that make shape-memory alloys special among martensites and Nickel-Titanium special among shape-memory alloys; proposed and demonstrated a new means of obtaining large electrostriction in ferroelectrics; and identified a new approach for exploiting active materials as microactuators. Current research includes the application of active materials to MEMS devices, the development of a new class of electroactive polymer composites, fundamental studies of the kinetics that governs the microstructure evolution in active materials, the development of a hard but tough steel and the application of ferroelectrics to photonic devices. A key idea is to engineer across scales by deliberately exploiting the microstructure of materials.

Selected Publications

The Material is the Machine (with R.D. James), Science, 307, pp. 53­54, 2005.

A Computational Model of Ferroelectric Domains. Part I: Model Formulation and Domain Switching and Part II: Grain Boundaries and Defect Pinning (with W. Zhang), Acta Mat., 53: pp. 185-198 and 199-209, 2005.

Investigation of Twin Wall Structure at the Nanometer Scale Using Atomic Force Microscopy (with D. Shilo and G. Ravichandran), Nature Mat., 3, pp.453-457, 2004.

Symmetry and Reversibility of Martensitic Transformations (with S. Conti, G. Zanzotto and J. Zimmer), Nature, 428, pp. 55-59, 2004.

Large Electrostrictive Actuation of Barium Titanate Single Crystals (with E. Burcsu and G. Ravichandran), J. Mech. Phys. Solids, 52, pp. 823-846, 2004.

Microstructure of Martensite. Why it Forms and How it Gives Rise to the Shape-Memory Effect, Oxford University Press, 2003.

An Asymptotic Study of the Debonding of Thin FIlms (with G. Francfort and I. Fonseca), Arch. Rat. Mech. Anal., 161 pp. 205-229.