L. B. Freund
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Primary Section: 31, Engineering Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1997)
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Research Interests
Our research is concerned with mechanical phenomena in solid materials. We have studied the relationship between the overall mechanical state of a deformable solid and localized physical processes of material fracture or failure, particularly in cases when material inertia effects are significant. Our work has led to descriptions of dynamic crack growth in elastic and elastic-plastic engineering materials, dynamic faulting in the earth's crust, fragmentation of ceramics and other brittle materials under impact loading, and dynamic failure in ductile materials. More recently, we have been concerned with problems of fabrication and reliability of microelectronic devices. Among the issues we have studied are: stress-driven surface diffusion and evolution of microstructure during vapor deposition of semiconductor materials; dislocation formation and growth in strained semiconductors; influence of strain on quantum mechanical charge transport in heterostructures; and strategies for fabrication of mechanically stable strained semiconductor structures.
