Mini-Symposium on Electro-Active Materials at WCCM IX

Dear Colleagues,



We like to draw your attention to the mini-symposium



MS6043 - Computational Mechanics of Electro-Active Materials



organized by Prof. Ellen Kuhl, Prof. Andreas Menzel and myself in the

WCCM IX. The abstract outlining the objectives of this integrative

mini-symposium is enclosed to this post as plain text and also as a

pdf-attachment.



The 9th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (www.wccm2010.com)

is going to be held in Sydney from July 19th to July 23rd, 2010. The

guidelines concerning the submission of abstracts can be found on the

dedicated web page of the conference .



Note that the deadline for abstract submissions is December 15th,

2009. Should you plan to contribute to the mini-symposium, please be

so good as to confirm your participation by e-mailing us with a tentative

title by November 30th, 2009. This will facilitate our coordination and

ensure that every speaker will be assigned an appropriate slot.



Best regards,

Serdar Goktepe (goktepe [at] stanford.edu)

Ellen Kuhl         (ekuhl [at] stanford.edu)

Andreas Menzel (andreas.menzel [at] udo.edu)

Abstract:



MS 6043 - Computational Mechanics of Electro-Active Materials



Aim: This mini-symposium aims to bring the researchers together from

different sub-disciplines of computational engineering sciences by

providing a common discussion platform for exchanging ideas on the

latest developments in the computational mechanics of electro-active

materials.



Motivation: The phrase "electro-active material" is intended to refer

to a broad class of materials that actively responds to an externally

applied or intrinsically generated electric field by undergoing

remarkable deformations. Similarly, they might also generate an

electric activity as subjected to a mechanical loading. Electro-active

materials are not restricted to man-made products such as

piezoelectrics, ferroelectrics, dielectric polymers but also cover a

wide range of bio-materials, like cardiac tissue. Synthetically

produced electro-active materials have a wide spectrum of applications

including high-tech devices, bio-medical products, artificial

muscles. The optimum design and successful manufacture of these

synthetic materials invariably necessitate accompanying quantitative

computational analyses of the products that commonly possess complex

geometries. The computational modeling of electro-active biological

tissue, on the other hand, plays a key role in guiding patient-specific

therapies such as surgical operations, novel stem cell-based

treatments of infarcted cardiac tissue when the experimental

techniques fall short. Advances in computational modeling of these

seemingly distinct classes of materials can, of course, mutually and

positively influence each other towards the development of artificial

organs and design of bio-inspired functionally-optimized high-tech

devices. 



Focus: The emphasis of this mini-symposium is focused on, but not

necessarily restricted to, the following areas:



• Theoretical and computational modeling of electo-active materials

  (thermodynamical considerations, variational aspects, generalized

  non-linear field equations, algorithmic procedures for time-stepping

  and operator split methods, to name a few.)



• Computational modeling of failure mechanisms and fracture mechanics

  of electro-active materials and active nano-composites



• Computationally guided design of functionally optimized

  electro-active materials



• Computational modeling of electro-active biological tissues such as

  natural and artificial muscle, retina and cardiac tissue



• Incorporation of couplings beyond the electro-mechanical and

  mechano-electrical effects such as thermal, magnetic, chemical fields