Zdenek Bazant

McCormick School Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor

Phone: (847) 491-4025
Fax: (847) 491-4011
E-mail: z-bazant@northwestern.edu

Prof. Bazant's interest spans mechanics of materials and structures, structural safety and engineering applications. The current investigations include some fundamental problems in the field of quasibrittle fracture and damage mechanics, fracture scaling and its asymptotics, size effects, probabilistic mechanics and extreme value statistics, micro- and nanomechanics, constitutive models, progressivecollapse of buildings, missile impact, seismic response, interfaces with chemo-mechanics, chemical reaction kinetics, diffusion, thermodynamics, poromechanics, landslides and geo-mechanics. His research team has been developing material models for fiber composites, concrete, rocks and soils, sea ice, snow, tough ceramics, sandwich shells, rigid foams, cellular materials, bone, and shape memory alloys. Applications have covered structural and aero-space engineering, building codes, ship design, automotive crashworthiness, arctic engineering, earthquake engineering and nuclear safety. Although the emphasis is theoretical, his team also conducts specialized fracture testing of composites, concretes and rocks. Computational modeling is a heavy component in each problem, but Bazant's attitude is to seek first analytical solutions and asymptotics-based approximations. The current and recent research sponsors include NSF, ONR, DoT, WES, ARO, DoE, Sandia N.L., DaimlerChrysler, Boeing, Cirrus Aircraft, and Argonne N.