 | | Mechanics of Solids
A Journal of Russian Academy of Sciences | | Founded
in January 1966
Issued 6 times a year
Print ISSN 0025-6544
Online ISSN 1934-7936 |
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| "On the Occasion of N. Kh. Arutyunyan's Hundredth Birthday," Mech. Solids. 47 (6), 599-600 (2012) |
| Year |
2012 |
Volume |
47 |
Number |
6 |
Pages |
599-600 |
| Title |
On the Occasion of N. Kh. Arutyunyan's Hundredth Birthday |
| Author(s) |
|
| Abstract |
November 23, 2012, is the hundredth birthday of Nagush Khachaturovich Arutyunyan, an outstanding scientist in the field of mechanics, a manager of science and higher education, a prominent statesman and an eminent public figure, founder of one scientific school in mechanics in Armenia, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR (currently the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia).
Arutyunyan was born to a family of Armenian intellectuals and got an excellent education in Moscow and Leningrad, where his scientific career started and his enormous creative potential began to develop under the influence of the outstanding mechanicians B. G. Galerkin, A. I. Lur'e, and E. L. Nikolai.
He defended his Ph.D. thesis in 1941, only several days before the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, where he participated from the first to the last day.
His first scientific papers in the early 1940s dealt with torsion and bending of elastic prismatic rods of polygonal cross-section. He proposed a method for solving such problems by reducing them to infinite systems of algebraic equations. The scientific results obtained in this direction were generalized and summarized in the encyclopedic monograph "Torsion of Elastic Bodies" written jointly with B. L. Abramyan (1963).
Arutyunyan's first world-class scientific contribution to mechanics of deformable solids is the creep theory of concrete developed by him together with G. N. Maslov at the end of the 1940s. Studying the results of concrete loading experiments, they discovered that the study of strength, durability, stability, and fracture of concrete engineering structures should take into account the properties caused by creep and by the time-dependence of physical and mechanical properties of materials, i.e., by aging. Further experimental studies by a number of scientists showed that these properties are typical not only of concrete by also of polymers, plastic materials, composites, soils, wood, and many other materials. A fruitful result of Arutyunyan's studies in this field is a new creep theory of aging bodies nowadays known as the Maslov-Arutyunyan creep theory. In 1949, he brilliantly defended his D.Sc. thesis, where the new theory of creep was presented, at the Institute for Mechanics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow and became Doctor of technical sciences.
Arutyunyan's fundamental results in creep theory of aging materials (first of all, concrete) were generalized in the monograph "Several Problems in Creep Theory" (1952), which is the first book on the field not only in the USSR but also in the world. This book has been a reference book for many generations of scientists and research engineers for decades. It was translated and published in England, France, and China, and some chapters of this book, in Germany, Poland, and Rumania.
Arutyunyan's work in the field of steady-state nonlinear creep and plasticity with power-law strengthening is well known. The superposition principle for generalized displacements proposed by Arutyunyan in 1959 was the first to allow obtaining integral equations that approximately describe complex nonlinear contact problems, and the solutions of these equations in closed form were the first approximate solutions of such complex problems in mechanics of deformable solids. The superposition principle for generalized displacements has been widely used and is still in use as one efficient method for studying nonlinear problems.
From the early 1960s until the mid-1970s, Arutyunyan held high administrative positions but still continued his scientific studies, paying special attention to contact problems in the theory of elasticity and creep.
In the mid-1970s, Arutyunyan significantly generalized and developed his creep theory of aging bodies by introducing the notion of age-inhomogeneity which substantially differs from the structural inhomogeneity. Such inhomogeneities appear in gradual construction of buildings and structures and manufacturing of machine elements and other deformable bodies. The fundamentals of this theory were presented in the monograph "Theory of Creep of Inhomogeneous Bodies" by Arutyunyan and V. B. Kolmanovskii (1983). In the book "Computations of Building Structures with Creep Taken into Account" by Arutyunyan and A. A. Zevin (1988), this theory was used to solve several applied problems.
The concepts underlying Arutyunyan's theory of inhomogeneously aging bodies naturally suggested the idea to generalize the mathematical model of deformable solids to the case of bodies growing because of attachment of new material elements to their surfaces. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Arutyunyan developed the foundations of a new scientific field, mechanics of growing bodies, which allows efficiently modeling a broad range of engineering problems, technological processes, and natural phenomena. The basic equations and the boundary conditions of the boundary value problems of mechanics of growing bodies, as well as the mechanical effects typical of such bodies, essentially differ from the classical ones. Their analysis is still an important problem that is very promising from the viewpoint of fundamental results and their use in various applications.
The scientific results obtained by Arutyunyan in this field are presented in numerous scientific papers and in the following monographs: N. Kh. Arutyunyan and V. E. Naumov, "Mechanics of Growing Viscoelastoplastic Bodies" (1987); N. Kh. Arutyunyan and A. V. Manzhirov, "Contact Problems of Elasticity" (1990, 1999); N. Kh. Arutyunyan, A. V. Manzhirov, and V. E. Naumov, "Contact problems of Mechanics of Growing Bodies" (1991).
For great services to his homeland and country, N. Kh. Arutyunyan was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of October Revolution, the Orders of the Patriotic War of the first and second degrees, the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and several medals.
N. Kh. Arutyunyan' scientific work will always stay in the treasure house of the world civilization, and his name ranks with the names of outstanding scientists of the 20th century. This is the deserved final of the long and bright life of a prominent scientist, citizen, and person.
N. Kh. Arutyunyan was Deputy Editor and member of the Editorial board of the journal "Izvestiya RAN. Mekhanika Tverdogo Tela" (Mechanics of Solids). The editorial board of the journal revere the memory of their colleague, friend, and teacher. |
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