Title| Phase-field Modeling and Computation of Fracture
Speaker| Prof. Dr.-Ing. Laura De Lorenzis, Institute of Applied Mechanics, TU Braunschweig, Germany.
Date| 31 January 2018 (Wednesday)
Time| 1330 – 1430
Venue| Think Tank 21, Building 2, Level 3 (2.310)
ABSTRACT
The talk discusses recent research results obtained in the group of the speaker in the framework of the phase-field approach to fracture. This framework is based on a regularization of Francfort and Marigo’s variational approach to fracture, and has the advantage to allow for the description of arbitrarily complex fracture topologies with a limited number of physically meaningful parameters in three dimensions and on a fixed mesh. A general overview is given on recently completed and ongoing work, including
- a phase-field modeling framework for fracture in partially saturated porous media, applied to the study of desiccation phenomena in soils and shrinkage in cementitious materials;
- a computational approach to combine the phase-field approach to brittle fracture with shell kinematics, in particular for Kirchhoff-Love shells;
- first results on fatigue in brittle materials and on fracture and fatigue in highly heterogeneous materials.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Laura De Lorenzis carried out her studies at the University of Lecce in Italy, and at the University of Missouri – Rolla (USA). As a young graduate she joined the University of Lecce as Assistant and later Associate Professor, until she moved to the TU Braunschweig in March 2013 as Professor and Director of the Institute of Applied Mechanics. She was visiting scholar in several institutions, including Chalmers University of Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Fulbright Fellowship), the Leibniz University of Hannover (Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship), the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Cape Town. She is the recipient of several prizes, including the RILEM L’Hermite Medal 2011, the AIMETA Junior Prize 2011, the IIFC Young Investigator Award 2012, and two best paper awards. In 2011 she was awarded an European Research Council Starting Researcher Grant. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers on international ISI journals on different topics of computational and applied mechanics.