MSE Seminar: Jack Mecholsky, Ph.D. – “The Retirement Seminar”

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Abstract

Failure is Its Own Reward

How many of you think of failure as – well, failure? I have dedicated my life to the study of failure in materials. I will first describe my path to destruction and then to illumination. Failure is a great teacher! The first time I saw a fracture surface, I discovered a new world. I want to relay that amazement so that you may see the wonders and world of information that can be obtained from examining a fracture surface. In fact, the observations and analyses may help determine methods by which we can improve the behavior of materials in severe environments.

I plan to show several examples of the beauty in failure and the hope for new ideas. The beauty of a fracture surface also includes the notions of fractal geometry, where the structure on the fracture surface is self-similar and scale invariant. This observation leads to the idea of quantum behavior related to macroscopic fracture. Thus, we can relate the fracture process from atomic bond breaking to the fracture surface features and, finally, to the macroscopic crack branching process – with one equation!

Bio

John J. (Jack) Mecholsky, Jr., Ph.D, is a Professor at the University of Florida in the Materials Science & Engineering Department. He served as the Associate Chair from 2005-2010 and 2017-2022, the Chair of the Faculty Senate in the 2009-2010 academic year, and served on the Board of Trustees for the University of Florida (2009-2010). He is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS). He served on the Board of Directors of the American Ceramic Society from 2006 to 2009. He is known as an international expert in quantitative fractographic analysis of brittle materials.

While on sabbatical leave (1995-1996) he served as the Associate Director for Materials at the Office of Naval Research in London (UK), as a Guest Researcher at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (2006), and at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge University (2013). As a recipient of the UF’s Faculty Enhancement Opportunity (FEO) award, he spent two months at Imperial College in London (2010) as a visiting researcher. He won the Teacher of the Year Award in 2006 and the Graduate Advisor of the Year Award in 2009. Before 1990, he held a joint appointment at Penn State University in the Materials Science Department as an Associate Professor and as a Research Associate in the (U. S. Navy’s) Advanced Research Laboratory. From 1979-1984, he was a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. He worked at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., from 1972 to 1979 as a Ceramic Research Engineer. While finishing his graduate degrees, he was a structural research engineer at the Naval Ship Research & Development Center (formerly the David Taylor Model Basin) from 1967-1972. He helped design the pressure hull for the Deep Submergence Search Vehicle (DSSV) and the escape hatch for the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle [shown in the movie “Hunt for Red October”].

He developed new fractographic techniques used in the failure analysis of dental FPDs, optical fibers, infrared transmitting radome materials, and of ferroelectrics. He also developed equations for analyzing failure by laser irradiation of ceramic materials. He holds patents for developing a laser-hardened composite material and a bioactive tape-cast multi-layer ceramic/metal composite. He has published over 200 technical papers and co-authored “Fracture of Brittle Materials: Testing and Analysis” (Wiley Pub. 2019).