Chasiotis and Group Win Best Paper Award

4/9/2013 Written by Susan Mumm

Editors of Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials and Structures have selected an article co-written by AE Assistant Prof. Ioannis Chasiotis for the journal's 2007 Best Paper Award.

Written by Written by Susan Mumm

Assistant Professor Ioannis Chasiotis
Assistant Professor Ioannis Chasiotis
Assistant Professor Ioannis Chasiotis
Editors of Fatigue and Fracture of Engineering Materials and Structures have selected an article co-written by AE Assistant Prof. Ioannis Chasiotis for the journal's 2007 Best Paper Award.

The article was entitled, "Mode I and mixed mode fracture of polysilicon for MEMS," p. 21-31, Volume 30, Issue 1, January 2007. Other authors were AE graduate student Krishna N. Jonnalagadda and Sung Woo Cho, PhD 2006, University of Virginia.

According to the award certificate, "This paper addressed for the first time experimentally the problem of mixed mode fracture in Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) by novel experiments coupled with detailed numerical analysis. A key finding of this paper is that failure (fracture) of brittle thin polycrystalline silicon films that are routinely used in MEMS is stochastic in nature, because it is strongly controlled by the random orientation of individual nanoscale grains comprising the material. As a consequence, one cannot talk about fracture toughness for these thin films, but rather a broad envelope of fracture toughness values with the grain boundaries providing the highest values."

Chasiotis' research interests are experimental mechanics at the nanoscale; mechanical reliability, fracture, and fatigue of MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS); NEMS and thin film electronic materials; failure mechanics of inhomogeneous/anisotropic materials; deformation and damage mechanics of polymer nanocomposites and soft nanophase materials; and applications of scanning probe microscopy in mechanics and biology.

Chasiotis has been a member of AE's faculty since 2005. He also is a part-time faculty member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory. Previously, he was a member of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty at the University of Virginia.

Chasiotis earned a chemical engineering degree in 1996 from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and earned a master's and PhD in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology in 1998 and 2002, respectively.


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This story was published April 9, 2013.