COLLABORATION IN BASIC SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (COBASE)

Dr. Zhen Chen (right) with his Russian colleague Sergey V. Razorenov

Dr. Zhen Chen, Associate Professor of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Missouri-Columbia traveled to Russia on the COBASE program from October 7-18, 2000. He collaborated with Dr. Gennady I. Kanel, the Laboratory head of the High Energy Density Research Center at the United Institute of High Temperatures. This institution is affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Chen's interest to collaborate with Dr. Kanel was partially due to the fact that the scientists and engineers in the Russian Academy of Sciences are among the first to report the formation and propagation of a failure wave in shocked glasses.

Dr. Chen attended the International Conference on Shock Waves in Condensed Matter, which was held in St. Petersburg. A number of major Russian researchers in the area of shock and failure gave presentations. Dr. Chen presented material on modeling and simulating the failure wave phenomenon. No consensus was made at this conference on the physics behind the failure wave phenomenon in amorphous materials. However, there exist enough data to show that some kind of progressive failure occurs in some glasses when they are shocked to near but below the Hugoniod elastic limit (HEL). Dr. Chen found the theoretical work of Russian scientists in this area to be outstanding.

Dr. Chen then visited Dr. Kanel's group at the Institute of Chemical Physics located in Chernogolovka, in the Moscow region. This group is an international pioneer in the investigation of failure waves. Though this institute has experienced a decline in funding over the last several years, Dr. Chen found all the researchers to have excellent training and high theoretical capability.

Through this initial visit, the current status of research has been investigated, and Dr. Chen has identified several research topics by working with Dr. Kanel’s group. Dr. Chen hopes to continue this collaboration on impact failure problems. The outline of a research proposal has been discussed, and potential funding agencies, such as the DOE/IPP (Department of Energy/Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention), National Science Foundation, and Army Research Office are being contacted to develop a funded joint research project.

Dr. Zhen Chen in front of Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia