Microstructures
Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
Ting Zhu is a professor and a Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He also holds a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received his B.S. in Engineering Mechanics in 1995 and Ph.D. in Solid Mechanics in 1999 (advisor: Prof. Wei Yang) from Tsinghua University. Then he received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004. He worked as a postdoctoral associate at Harvard University, before joining Georgia Tech in 2005. His research is focused on mechanics and materials modeling. He receives the Sia Nemat-Nasser Early Career Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 2013 and the Young Investigator Medal from the Society of Engineering Science in 2014. Zhu is an ASME Fellow.
Professor Zhu's research focuses on the modeling and simulation of mechanical behavior of materials at the nano- to macroscale. Some of the scientific questions he is working to answer include understanding how materials fail due to the combined mechanical and chemical effects, what are the atomistic mechanisms governing the brittle to ductile transition in crystals, why the introduction of nano-sized twins can significantly increase the rate sensitivity of nano-crystals, and how domain structures affect the reliability of ferroelectric ceramics and thin films. To address these problems, which involve multiple length and time scales, he has used a variety of modeling techniques, such as molecular dynamics simulation, reaction pathway sampling, and the inter-atomic potential finite-element method. The goal of his research is to make materials modeling predictive enough to help design new materials with improved performance and reliability.
