Broadening Our Understanding Of Conventional And Advanced Composite Materials

Mechanical Engineering Professor Receives ASME ORR Early Career Award

The urgency for greater understanding of composite materials has become more critical within recent years for its use in a wide range of engineering applications including automotive/aerospace crashworthiness, biomedical implants, the structural safety of large composite structures -- to name a few.

Kedar Kirane, Assistant Professor in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ Department of Mechanical Engineering has centered these various topics in research projects related to heterogeneous composite materials.  In recognition, he has received the prestigious 2020 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) ORR Early Career Award for his research on constitutive modeling of fatigue failures in engineering structures made of concrete and polycrystalline Titanium alloys. He has also contributed towards the development of a theory for the size effect in Paris law for concrete and improved the understanding of the effect of quasibrittleness on fatigue crack growth and its scaling. 

“It is exciting to discover, investigate, and predict behaviors in materials which were not understood or analyzed so far,” Professor Kirane said regarding his interest within his work. “It is also very rewarding to be able to contribute to knowledge and technology that can enable safer, reliable, and efficient structures in various engineering applications.”

“The ability to analyze structural reliability and the potential for new applications of materials are critical to the important mission of creating safer protocols within engineering,” stated Robert Kukta, Acting Dean, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “We are very fortunate to gain new levels of perception from Kedar on composite materials and their applications.”

The ASME ORR Early Career Award was established in 2004 to recognize early-career research excellence in the areas of experimental, computational, or theoretical fatigue, fracture, or creep. Donated by the Orr family, it consists of an honorarium and a certificate and is given annually at ASME IMECE by the Orr Family through the Materials Division of ASME.  This is Kirane’s third award celebrating his research of fracture and scaling of advanced composite materials: previously he was the recipient of the 2019 Department of Defense Army Research Office’s Young Investigator Award and the 2018 Haythornthwaite Research Initiation Grant from the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME.

Professor Kirane is a member of ASME and EMI (ASCE), a reviewer for many prestigious international journals, and serves on the Computational Mechanics and Modeling Inelastic Behavior of Materials committees of EMI (ASCE).