Dear fellow researcher in finite elements 

We will be hosting a 3 day course on the state-of-the-art open-source finite element library deal.II . The course will be run by Prof Wolfgang Bangerth from Texas A&M. It will take place in Cape Town, South Africa, from 5-7 August 2013. The course is aimed at postgraduate students and researchers who wish to learn the fundamentals of deal.II for use in their own research.

 As structural optimization can be, of course, greatly sped up with the use of analytical sensitivies (analytical gradients) of the e.g. stress with respect to geometrical design variables, I wanted to inquire which FE software has the functionality.  The ones I am aware of: NASTRAN can and ANSYS cannot. How about others?

 Many thanks in advance!

Dear Colleagues:

We would like to invite you to submit a contribution to a minisymposium that we are organizing on Emerging Methods for Large-Scale Quantum-Mechanical Materials Calculations at the 12th US National Congress on Computational Mechanics, to be held July 22-25, 2013 in Raleigh, NC. This minisymposium aims to bring together leading researchers in this emerging area to discuss and exchange ideas on new methods developments for density-functional calculations, mathematical analysis, and applications of ab initio methods in electronic-structure calculations.

Dear all,

Please find enclosed our paper which is published on Journal of Multiscale Modelling
Vol. 3, No. 4 (2011) 1–42 which gives an overview of state of the art multiscale techniques for material modeling. 

The paper discusses the following topics: homogenization, Representative volume element, computational homogenization (Fe2 methods) for both both bulk materials and strong discontinuities. 

I hope the paper is useful for beginners to the field.

All the bests, 

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                                         Call for participation
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                  Workshop on Barycentric Coordinates in Geometry
                  Processing and Finite/Boundary Element Methods

A post-doctoral position is available at our continuum mechanics workgroup (Prof. Tsakmakis, TU Darmstadt, Germany) for developing user subroutines and user elements in finite element programs.

Experience in nonlinear finite element analysis, numerical methods in solid mechanics and FORTRAN 90 is needed.

If you are interested, please contact me, Dr. C. Broese,  broese@mechanik.tu-darmstadt.de

(Opening date: June, 1st 2012 - Closing date: June, 30th 2012)

Post Doc description:

Soil, as a typical natural material, has very complex behaviour which is very difficult to be accurately modelled. In geotechnical engineering, about half of the accidents are caused by insufficient designs. The soil’s constitutive model is the fundamental issue for modelling and analyzing soil-related engineering systems.

I have an open position for a Post-doctoral researcher in the area of the mechanics of biological materials and novel biomimetic materials, starting immediately. The projects involve mechanics of biological and engineered nano and micro-interfaces, mechanics of fish scales, and design, fabrication and testing of composite materials inspired from nacre. The successful candidate will lead 1-2 projects and will be involved in another 2-3 ongoing projects in these areas, in collaboration with graduate students (more below).   

I'm interested in developing finite element software for soft matter configurations.  Is there any open source FE software already developed for such materials?  My purpose is to research and develop algorithms that use GPU technology for modelling complex materials on a desktop

Environment

The post-doctoral position will be accomplished within the BATir (Building, Architecture & Town planning) department of the Brussels School of Engineering/´Ecole polytechnique de Bruxelles, at the Universit´e Libre de Bruxelles (http://batir.ulb.ac.be ). Duration of the position: 18 months, starting in April 2012.

Profile

The applicant should hold a PhD in computational mechanics. Additional competences in numerical optimization, and structural finite elements, as well as programming skills (in MATLAB, PYTHON, C++, or any equivalent programming anguage) will be highly appreciated.

A linear (hyperbolic) first-order system has to be solved using Finite Elements.

As I understand usually non-standard discretizations are used in this case (Discontinuous Galerkin for example).

What is the reason for this? Can such an equation be modeled using standard Galerkin methods (say, linear finite elements)? 

Would standard Galerkin discretization cause instability of the solution?

Thanks,

Daniel

 Post-Doc Opening: Bio-inspired Architectural Armor Design