I am developing an FEA code for a viscoelastic contact analysis. Right now the formulation is assuming small deformations. After deformation I am getting the volume of the body to be less than the original. I want to preserve the volume. ANSYS gives exact results as my code by carrying a normal contact analysis.

High Performance Computing MSc+Ph.D. position available at the University of Glasgow on Massively Parallel Brain Surgery Simulation with the extended finite element method (XFEM and FleXFEM)  (University of Glasgow) -- funding body is EPSRC.

One year MSc in HPC in Edinburgh (all costs covered by funding) + 3 year Ph.D.  and access to HecToR, one of the world's largest super-computer, including training with experts in massively parallel simulation (10,000+ processors).

Supervisor: Dr Stephane Bordas,Dr Lee Margetts (Manchester)

Collaborators: Prof. Ray Ogden and Prof. Gerhard Holzapfel

A PhD position is available for a thesis with SKF Aerospace France in the Laboratoire Génie de Production - Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Tarbes - France

Detailled subject (in French) can be found at : http://pantale.free.fr

Starting date October 2007

CV+letter can be send until September 8th 2007 to : Olivier.Pantale@enit.fr 

When an electric voltage is applied across the thickness of a thin layer of an dielectric elastomer, the layer reduces its thickness and expands its area. This electrically induced deformation can be rapid and large, and is potentially useful as soft actuators in diverse technologies. Recent experimental and theoretical studies have shown that, when the voltage exceeds some critical value, the homogenous deformation of the layer becomes unstable, and the layer deforms into a mixture of thin and thick regions. Subsequently, as more electric charge is applied, the thin regions enlarge at the expense of the thick regions. On the basis of a recently formulated nonlinear field theory, this paper develops a meshfree method to simulate numerically this instability.

Zhigang Suo, Xuanhe Zhao, and William H. Greene