Thinking Solid Mechanics

The Solid Mechanics and Design group at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur consists of a focused and motivated team of people engaged in teaching and research in almost all contemporary areas of Solid Mechanics.

Artwork courtesy: Riju Chatterjee

State of the Art

How do we make the cutting edge sharper?

Experimental Techniques in Solid Mechanics

We gathered five leading experts to discuss the challenges faced by experimental Solid Mechanics and brainstorm ideas to overcome them. Profs Nagamani Jaya Balila from Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science, IITB, Nilesh Gurao from Materials Science and Engineering IITK, Ratna Kumar Annabattula from Mechanical Engineering IITM, P Venkitanarayanan from Mechanical Engineering IITK and Sankara Subramanian from IndicVision joined the discussion which was moderated by

Jan 39 min read

Blackboard

Short lectures explaining pain points in Solid Mechanics, by those who understand them.

Dealing with stress

If the Cauchy stress principle and the mystery of the traction vector confounds you, here is a 20 min video by Prof Anurag Gupta that explains the connection. More available at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpGHlNk4vzY

Views

On emerging areas of Solid Mechanics, from our archives

Flexoelectricity and Electrets

Flexoelectric materials are dielectrics that behave like piezoelectrics under non uniform strains like in bending. Unlike piezoelectric materials which need to possess special crystal structures, flexoelectricity is universal --- all dielectrics can potentially be flexoelectric. Unfortunately, flexoelectricity manifests at very small length scales. On the other hand, electrets are dielectrics with permanent electric charges embedded in them either naturally or during fabrication. In this webinar, Prof Pradeep Sharma from the University of Houston discusses the exciting idea of creating soft flexoelectrics using specially designed electrets.

Features

Reports on ongoing research at SMD@iitkanpur

Crawling through pipes

Millions of kilometres of pipelines carrying oil, gas and water criss-cross the face of the earth. Making sure that they are in good health requires robots that can crawl through their insides and check if the inner walls have defects. Prof. Bishakh Bhattacharya and his team have a low-cost solution. Its a PIG.

Jan 46 min read

Secrets of dirty ice

Shruthi Pandey, P Venkitanarayanan and Ishan Sharma are trying to understand the failure mechanism of ice laden with dirt when subjected to sudden, rapid and very large loads. Dirty ice is often the cement binding boulders that make up glacial dams holding huge volumes of water. Understanding how they fail is crucial to modelling ice dam bursts that are known to cause devastation in the high mountains.

Oct 22, 20256 min read

Challenges

Gauntlets thrown by Prof Anindya Chatterjee

Challenge date 06-01-2026

Oct 22, 20251 min read