Description
The study of fracture using computational methods has deep-reaching applications throughout science and engineering. Fracture simulations are crucial in devising new lighter, stronger and efficient materials for various applications. Therefore, engineers and scientists are thriving to develop advanced computational methods to design materials from the bottom up.
Fracture simulation requires developing suitable analytical models, discretising the resulting partial differential equations, and solving them numerically. Each of the above three steps poses its own difficulties, like: non-linear and non-homogeneous behaviour around the crack tip. Variety of solutions have been proposed to tackle such issues, both academically and for practical applications. A technique to overcome the non-linearities around the crack tip is to design the materials through the bottom up approach.
In this mini-symposium, we welcome topics related to analytical formulation, discretisation and solution methods to a variety of problems ranging from composites to photovoltaic solar cells, involving layered materials, multiple length and time scales as well as multiple fields, leading to a number of failure modes: brittle, inter and intra layer to ductile fracture.
The scope of this mini-symposium can be categorised into the following five groups:
- Computational methods to simulate fracture in the continuum, as well as inter/intra layer fracture in laminated fibre reinforced composites and sandwiched structures, with emphasis on delamination migration.
- Computational methods to estimate the current-voltage characteristics (voltammograms) energy generators like batteries (Lithium-ion) and photovoltaic solar cells. Such sources involves the interaction of mechanical, thermal, chemical, electric and electronic fields with dynamic charge movement. Multiphysics methods are the appropriate techniques to predict the voltammograms in the presence of defects (cracks/voids) in such materials.
- Molecular/atomistic methods to simulate a phenomena/process of materials considering the defects like cracks, dislocations and voids, for applications in polymer nano-composites, Lithium-ion batteries and photovoltaic solar cells.
- The computational efficiency of sub-scale (molecular) methods can be enhanced by coupling the scales, by restricting the sub-scale models in the areas of interest only. Therefore, multiscale methods coupling the sub and macro scale models such that the sub-scale model can be adaptively adjusted with as the defect grows, have proven to be efficient to simulate the fracture with good accuracies.
- Parameter identification in fracture mechanics is a topic of special interest in practical applications and a necessary step to provide convincing and predictive modelling and simulation tools. The focus of this mini-symposium is on methods for crack parameter identification and multifield problems.
Key words: Computational methods for fracture; Fibre reinforced composites and sandwiched structures; Lithium-ion batteries; Photovoltaic solar cells; Current-voltage characteristics; Adaptive multiscale methods for fracture; Multiphysics methods;
Organizers
P.R. Budarapu (School of Mechanical Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, 752050 India)
M.K. Pandit (School of Mechanical Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, 752050 India)
A.K. Pradhan (School of Mechanical Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, 752050 India)
S. Natarajan (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600025, India)
T. Rabczuk (Institute of Structural Mechanics, Bauhaus Universitat of Weimar, 99423 Weimar, Germany)
Contact
P.R. Budarapu (pattabhi@iitbbs.ac.in)