Word of the Week 2: Anisotropic (Material)

This WotW isn't an adjective to describe my week but it is an adjective that I have learned and used a lot this week. It was my second full week of graduate classes and I am starting to get into the "meat" (or should I use veggies hehe) of the classes and out of the introductions and general lectures. I'm taking two classes and anisotropic and isotropic are used in my Mechanics of Composite Materials course. When referring to a material, anisotropic means that the material properties at any point vary with the direction or depend on the orientation of reference axes. This is the opposite of isotropic materials which means that the properties are the same in all directions or are independent of the orientation of the axes.

Hmmmm... confused? I kinda was too. I mean, I understood isotropic previously as being basically "the same" when used in things like chemistry. This seems to hold true for a material as well- basically it acts "the same" no matter what direction load are applied. This is why I chose anisotropic as my WotW, since I have never used it before.

Composites are extremely dependent on the direction of the material for their material properties. I will explain this using the simplest natural composite material I know: wood. Imagine say, a 2 x 4. We can crack this 2 x 4 and look into it and see that the wood fibers are long and go from one end to another.This material has different strength properties depending on how I load up that 2 x 4 beam (across the long fibers or directly on the ends of the fibers). This is an anisotropic material. Now take a piece of metal, say aluminum. Its doesn't matter what way I load that aluminum, it will deform the same. Aluminum would be considered isotropic. Since most composite structures are designed to take a load in one direction over another (thus optimizing the design to cut weight when it isn't needed to carry a load), most are anisotropic which is why its important that I learned that word!

See, aren't you glad you visited my blog today?

Other fun things this week: more rehearsals for our dinner theater show, Hubby won some cool awards at work for being an awesome pilot, and on Saturday we got to go to a Sumo match in Tokyo. I wrote a huge post on that last year so go check it out if you want to learn more about Sumo!