The Mechanics of Soft Solids (MSS) group is based within the James Watt School of Engineering at the University of Glasgow. Our aim at the MSS group is to generate new scientific knowledge by focussing on rigorous, original, and impactful research and training the next generation of researchers in solid mechanics.

Current research in the MSS group covers a wide range of areas including mechanics of soft tissues, electro- and magneto-mechanical coupling in solids, and mechanics of rods, plates, and shells. Please see our research page for more details. We have very close ties with the Glasgow Computational Engineering Centre.

Upcoming Conference: Our group is organising the Euromech colloquium on stability and bifurcation problems in nonlinear solid mechanics to be held at the University of Glasgow in April 2025.

Group updates:

• [March 2025] New paper: Plane stress finite element modelling of arbitrary compressible hyperelastic materials accepted for publication in Acta Mechanica.

• [Feb 2025] New paper: Deformation and stability of initially stressed hyperelastic plates published in the International Journal of Solids and Structures.

• [Dec 2024] Prashant visited IIT Indore and delivered a seminar titled "Stability of highly deformable magnetoelastic structures"

• [Dec 2024] Davood starts his visit to Professr Luis Dorfmann at Tufts University to accelerate his work on instability in finitely deformed magnetoelastic solids.

• [Oct 2024] New paper: Surface instability of a finitely deformed magnetoelastic half-space published in the International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics

• [Oct 2024] Masoud successfully defends his PhD titled "Modelling piezoresistive behaviour in finitely deformed elastomeric composites"

• [Sep 2024] New paper: Impact of compliant electrodes on the dynamics of electromagnetoactive membranes published in the International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics

• [July 2024] New paper: In recognition of the 80th birthday of Ray Ogden published in Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids

• [July 2024] New paper: An embedding-aware continuum thin shell formulation submitted to arxiv.

• [June 2024] Dr Abhishek Ghosh finishes his postdoctoral tenure with us and moves to the School of Mathematics & Statistics.

• [May 2024] Dr Aman Khurana from IIT Indore starts his 2-month long visit to the group.

• [April 2024] Masoud presented his research at the annual UKACM conference.

• [April 2024] Davood presented his research at the annual BAMC conference.

• [March 2023] Prashant gave an invited presentation at the Euromech/ICMS colloquium on nonlinear elasticity organised in the honour of Prof Ray Ogden.

• [Dec 2023] New paper: Analytical modelling of the electrical conductivity of CNT-filled polymer nanocomposites is accepted for publication in Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids

• [Sep 2023] New paper: A Galerkin Approach for Analysing Coupling Effects in the Piezoelectric Semiconducting Beam is accepted for publication in the European Journal of Mechanics - A/Solids

• [Aug 2023] New paper: A fully-coupled nonlinear magnetoelastic thin shell formulation is deposited on arxiv.

• [July 2023] New paper: Computational instability analysis of inflated hyperelastic thin shells using subdivision surfaces published in Computational Mechanics

• [June 2023] Masoud wins the Jim Gatheral PGR travel scholarship. He will visit University of Erlangen-Nuremberg for two months to accelerate his work on open-source deal.ii software.

• [June 2023] Prashant co-organised a summer school titled "Nonlinear electro- and magneto-mechanics: Theory, Computations, and Experiments" at the International Centre for Mechanical Sciences (CISM), Udine, Italy.

• [April 2023] Masoud presented his research at the annual UKACM conference while Abhishek and Davood presented their research at the annual BAMC conference.

• [March 2023] Davood wins the Jim Gatheral PGR travel scholarship. He will visit Tufts University for two months to collaborate on his research on instabilities in magnetoelastic solids.

• [Jan 2023] Sumit defends his PhD titled "A study of instabilities in hyperelastic solids" and moves on to Denmark Technical University as a postdoc.

Recent representative publications:

• Computational instability analysis of inflated hyperelastic thin shells using subdivision surfaces (open access) (2023)
  Zhaowei Liu, Andrew McBride, Abhishek Ghosh, Luca Heltai, Weicheng Huang, Tiantang Yu, Paul Steinmann, Prashant Saxena
  Computational Mechanics 

• Vibration Analysis of Piezoelectric Kirchhoff-Love Shells based on Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces (open access) (2022)
  Zhaowei Liu, Andrew McBride, Prashant Saxena, Luca Heltai, Yilin Qu, Paul Steinmann
  International Journal of Numerical Methods in Engineering

• Coupled electro-elastic deformation and instabilities of a toroidal membrane (2021)
  Zhaowei Liu, Andrew McBride, Basant Lal Sharma, Paul Steinmann, Prashant Saxena
  Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, 151: 104221 [arxiv]

• Wrinkling as a mechanical instability in growing annular hyperelastic plates (open access) (2021)
  Sumit Mehta, Gangadharan Raju, Prashant Saxena
  International Journal of Mechanical Sciences, vol. 229, 107481 

• Variational principles of nonlinear magnetoelastostatics and their correspondences (open access) (2021)
  Basant Lal Sharma, Prashant Saxena
  Mathematics and Mechanics of solids, vol. 26 (10), 1424-1454

Funding:

We thank the following organisation for funding our research

• Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK

• Science and Engineering Research Board, India

Contact:

We are physically based at the Rankine Building, Oakfield Avenue, University of Glasgow, G12 8LT, UK

For all enquiries, contact Dr Prashant Saxena