[/sor/header.htm]
SoR logo

Rheology Bulletin

Vol. 67, No. 2 (July 1998)

Rakesh Gupta, Editor


[Rheology Bulletin Home Page][Recent Issues]

Contents


Executive Committee - 1995-97

President Ronald G. Larson
Vice President Gerald G. Fuller
Secretary Andrew M. Kraynik
Treasurer Montgomery T. Shaw
Editor Morton M. Denn
Past President Kurt F. Wissbrun
Members-at-Large Donald G. Baird
Paula Moldenaers

Return to Contents


Committees

Membership
W. E. VanArsdale, chair
S. Drappel
A. J. Giacomin
P. Moldenaers
L. E. Wedgewood
Education
S. J. Muller, chair
D. G. Baird
P. E. Clark
E. A. Collins
W. M. Prest
W. E. VanArsdale
R. Webber
Meetings Policy
R. G. Larson, chair
G. G. Fuller
A. J. Giacomin
A. M. Kraynik
R. L. Powell
Bingham Award
A. Chow, chair
G. C. Berry
D. F. James
A. J. McHugh
W. M. Prest, Jr.

Return to Contents


Nominations for the 1999 Bingham Medal

Nominations are invited for the 1999 Bingham award. These should be submitted before January 15, 1999 to the next chair of the Bingham award Committee:

Dr. Andrea Chow
Caliper Technologies Corp.
1275 California Ave.
Palo Alto,CA 94305

Award guidelines may be found at http://www.umecheme.maine.edu/sor/awards/bingham/rules.htm

Return to Contents


John M. Dealy
1998 Bingham Medalist

The Bingham medal of the Society for 1998 will be awarded at the Monterey meeting to Professor John M. Dealy of McGill University. A write-up appears below. Congratulations John!


Photo of Professor John M. DealyJohn M. Dealy of McGill University has been chosen to receive the 1998 Bingham medal. John has made numerous outstanding contributions to the science of rheology. These include the invention of new experimental techniques by building innovative equipment to advance knowledge in the science, his clear and instructive papers and his two excellent books on rheology. The invention of the shear stress transducer and its successful incorporation into a sliding plate rheometer is one of the most significant contributions to experimental melt rheology. It solved many problems previously encountered in conventional sliding plate rheometers and marked the advent of the measurement of non-linear viscoelasticity in concentrated polymer solutions and melts. As an example, the use of exponential shear flow as a strong flow and its comparison with extensional flows and unsteady shear flows were first recognized by John M. Dealy.

John M. Dealy is a leader among rheologists serving the industrial community. His excellent knowledge and understanding of both rheology and polymer processing operations rank him amongst the most influential rheologists in the processing of polymer melts. He is a leader in developing correlations between rheological measurements and processability, and on how rheology can be used to understand polymer performance. His careful and innovative work on measuring die swell of molten polymers flowing through diverging and converging annular dies is classic literature. His recent work on the wall slip and melt fracture of molten polyethylenes and elastomers is another outstanding contribution to the science of rheology. Most recently, Professor John M. Dealy developed the pressurized sliding plate rheometer, the only rheometer that can measure clearly the effects of pressure on the rheological properties and slip velocity of molten polymers and elastomers. Its development took genius, dedication and patience. Professor John M. Dealy is not only a fine scholar but also a master teacher who makes rheology understandable and logical. Many of his manuscripts and his two books on rheology demonstrate this. In particular, his last book with Kurt Wissbrun, "Melt Rheology and its Role in Plastics Processing", is a model of clarity. His tutorial lectures in scientific meetings are considered amongst the best delivered papers. This is mainly due to his abilities to communicate complicated concepts in an incisive and simple way. Please join the Society in Monterey to celebrate John’s success.

Savvas G. Hatzikiriakos and A. Jeffrey Giacomin

Return to Contents


70th Annual Meeting
Monterey, CA
October 4 - 8, 1998

The Autumn 1998 meeting of the Society of Rheology will be held at the Monterey Marriott Hotel in Monterey, California. Details of the technical program may be found on the meeting web pages while other details are given inside this issue of Rheology Bulletin. Also enclosed are the meeting registration and hotel reservation forms. The meeting organizers are:

Technical Program Chairs
     Patrick T. Mather
Air Force Research Lab
AFRL/MLBP, Bldg. 654
2941 P St., Ste 1
Wright Patterson AFB, OH 45433-7750
(937) 255-9152; Fax: (937) 255-9157
e-mail: matherpt@ml.wpafb.af.mil

Ralph H. Colby
Dept. of Materials Science & Engineering
The Pennsylvania State University
309 Steidle Building
University Park, PA 16802-5007
(814) 863-3457; Fax: (814) 865-2917
e-mail: RHC@plmsc.psu.edu

Local Arrangement Chair
Gerald G. Fuller
Department of Chemical Engineering
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5025
(650) 723-9243; Fax: (650) 725-7294
e-mail: ggf@chemeng.stanford.edu

Instrument Exhibit

Several companies will exhibit rheological instrumentation at the annual meeting.

Poster Session

A poster session will be held in Monterey. Abstracts should be submitted to the session chair, Professor S.J. Muller of the University of California at Berkeley, by August 21, 1998. Please use the web-based procedure.

Return to Contents


Journal Of Rheology Archival CD-ROM

Those of you who attended the Business Meeting in Columbus, or who actually read the minutes of the Meeting in the January 1998 Bulletin, will not be surprised to see an insert in the mailing of this Bulletin offering a set of four CD-ROMs containing Volumes 1-41 (1957-1997) of the Journal of Rheology at a special pre-publication price.

At the time of the Columbus meeting this Archival CD-ROM was only a concept. We have now seen the product and think that you will be delighted with it. One immediate, obvious advantage to those of you who have been members for a long time is that it will save you many feet of shelf space; for newer members it provides inexpensive, ready access to years of valuable publications.

However, the most valuable feature of this product is that it makes it possible to search this extensive literature electronically. An Adobe Acrobat 3.0 Reader is installed directly from the CD-ROM. Every paper has been scanned and converted to searchable text by sophisticated optical character recognition (OCR) software. Even the small print of the references is searchable! For example, it is possible to find the name "Sensenbaugh" in a reference in a classic paper by Markovitz in Volume 1 of the Journal. In addition, it is possible to search not only the entire text on the CD-ROM, but also to limit the searches to specific fields, such as Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords. And the searches may be narrowed as desired by combining search requirements. For instance, a search of CD-1 (Vols. 1-19) on "Bagley" in the Author field turned up six papers (out of a total of 722). Combining "Bagley" in the Author field with the word "swell" in the text field narrowed the result to one highly relevant paper.

Once you have found a desired article, you can view it at various magnifications on your PC monitor. The article, or any selected pages, may be printed to a printer or to a file. Or, the text of the entire paper or selected portions may be copied into other documents such as MS Word. If desired, the entire printable image of the paper, in the form of a "PDF" file, may be copied from the CD-ROM onto the computer hard disk.

There are some drawbacks that need to be mentioned. The scanned image is not as sharp, either on the monitor screen or when printed, as the original. It is, however, quite readable on the screen by using the available magnification. Also, printing the large PDF files may be relatively slow, depending on the capabilities of your PC and printer. Finally, the OCR software can never be 100% reliable, in effect producing occasional "typos" in the text. And, of course, there are some typos in the original (e.g. "Silt" Rheometer) as well. Searchers need to develop suitable strategies, therefore, to find all the relevant articles by searching on more than one term. It still beats searching manually!

We hope that many of you are as enthusiastic about this product as we are, and that it will facilitate your use of the great literature that has been generated in more than forty years of the Journal.

Additional information and ordering instructions are available on the web.

Return to Contents


Comments From the President
Ron Larson

How Is The SoR Doing?

I am pleased to assume the Presidency of the Society at this time. Our Society is healthy, by all accounts. Membership is growing, to around 1800 at last count, about 70% higher than a decade ago. Our meetings continue to be well attended, typically drawing around 300, a number which has held steady for several years now at a time of decline for some societies. Thanks to energetic efforts of the meeting organizers (Bill VanArsdale in Galveston and Jack Zakin in Columbus), and program organizers, the meetings continue to provide an excellent value for our members. In the capable hands of our editor Mort Denn, the Journal of Rheology continues to flourish as the premier journal in the field. Here, too, the rate of publication is holding steady at around 50 articles per year, and the quality seems only to get better. The relatively new "best paper" award also adds a dash of class, with last year’s award going to the Belgian group of Vinckier, Moldenaers, and Mewis, for a seminal publication on blend rheology. This last item hints at another happy trend in our Society, that of growing international participation. Around 40% of the members are international, and similar percentages of the papers and talks involve international participants. It is thus entirely fitting that our members have, for the first time, voted an international scientist, Paula Moldenaers, to the Executive Committee as a Member at Large.

In addition to maintaining the quality of its "bread and butter" functions, namely the Journal and annual meetings, the SoR is adding additional member value through its biannual Rheology Bulletin, edited by Rakesh Gupta. The Bulletin is now publishing advertisements and short, practical, articles of wide interest to rheologists. The Society web pages (http://www.umecheme.maine.edu/sor/), managed adroitly by Albert Co, are garnering several thousand hits per month. The Society’s education committee, now chaired by Susan Muller, membership committee, headed by Bill VanArsdale, and constitution committee, led by Faith Morrison, are helping our Society advance into the 21st century. We are also continually renewing our Society by bringing active young members, as well as experienced hands, onto our various committees.

What Challenges Does The SoR Face?

I believe there are several issues that we must successfully confront over the next few years, if we are to continue to perform optimally. The first is the challenge of electronic publishing, which both threatens our revenue base and offers great opportunities for new services to benefit our members. Fortunately, thanks to careful stewardship of our finances by past treasurer Ed Collins, and present treasurer Monty Shaw, the SoR is financially well prepared to move aggressively in this area. This year, libraries are receiving with their subscription to JoR domain licenses for electronic access to the Journal at http://ojps.aip.org/. This will permit downloading of PDF files of articles, as well as access to AIP and IEEE data bases such as INSPEC and SPIN. Soon, you will be able to click on a reference in a JoR article and bring up the abstract of the referenced paper. If the library subscribes to that journal, free viewing of the article will be available to everyone logging in from the library’s domain. For everyone without an institutional subscription, a pay-per-view option will permit the article to be purchased. Thus, from your office or home, you will be able to "daisy chain" from one reference to the next. Full-text searchability of the JoR is on the (somewhat more distant) horizon as well. It may be the case that JoR readers will spend more time with electronic copy than with the printed text. In parallel with our expanding efforts in the electronic arena, the SoR will this year make available to its members a CD-ROM containing all back issues of the JoR, for an introductory price of only $130. The CD-ROM will not only free up shelf space, but is searchable as well, and thus offers additional advantages over the printed page. All members are urged to avail themselves both of the CD-ROM, and of electronic access to JoR. If your library is slow to subscribe to the free electronic access to which it is entitled, our resident bulldog Jeff Giacomin will act as your ombudsman.

The second challenge I see is to maintain a balance between academic and industrial participation in the SoR. Continuing changes in industry challenge our Society to remain relevant, even as it advances the science of rheology. Fortunately, our subject matter is inherently valuable to industry, and graduate students in the field of rheology are in demand. By listening more closely to our industrial members and monitoring and encouraging their participation in our meetings, I am optimistic that the SoR will remain a vital forum for industrially relevant research.

In addition to these priorities, we must find new ways to educate our members and the public to our Society’s offerings, through web pages, videos, and courses. And we plan to update our constitution. Stay tuned; you will be hearing much more about these exciting developments in the very near future.

Return to Contents


Meeting Announcement

September 13-15, 1998
North American Thermal Analysis Society 26th Annual Conference, Cleveland, OH.
Symposium include characterization of polymers by TA.
For information check  http://www.mindspring.com/~natasinfo/ or call Shana Henry at (916) 922-7032.

Return to Contents

[Rheology Bulletin Home Page][Recent Issues]


[/sor/mailto.htm]
Updated 14 February 2010