December 1th 2022

Meshfree models for Engineers: Where are they really worthwhile ?

Miguel Molinos, Pedro Navas and Manuel Pastor

Mesh-free models have become increasingly popular in the computational mechanics community, especially when traditional mesh-based approaches –such as the Finite Element Method (FEM)– may lose their predictive capacity due to excessive mesh distortions induced by large deformations. However, mesh-free models remain relatively unknown among most engineers (compared to FEM), and are relegated to purely academic cases most of the time. One of the reasons may be the fact that engineers do not usually design conventional structures to behave in the finite deformation regime, which is commonly associated with the post-failure behaviour of the structure (buckling, slope failure and others). Indeed, before it happens, FEM simulations are able to predict the early stages of the dominant failure mechanism and thus calculate safety factors, which is in most of the cases the main concern of professional engineers. Naturally, the following questions may arises, there is room for mesh-free methods in daily engineering? And finally, what are the applications that can be subject to this type of methodology? This thematic seminar aims answer this question (and related-ones) and to open a discussion between pure numerical researchers and those which interact with industry.

Event organizers

Miguel Molinos

Postdoctoral researcher (SEMTA member)

Universidad de Sevilla

Miguel Molinos is a recent Ph.D. graduate in computational mechanics and currently holds a postdoc position at Universidad de Sevilla. His main line of research is the simulation of civil engineering materials such as concrete and soils within mesh-free techniques. His recent research interest is multiscale analysis using atomistic-resolution models.

Expertise: Material Point Method

Pedro Navas

Assistant Professor

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Pedro Navas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Continuous Mechanics and Theory of Structures at the School of Civil Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM). His main line of research is the simulation of civil engineering materials such as concrete and soils within mesh-free techniques.

Expertise: Optimal Transportation Meshfree

Manuel Pastor

Professor

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Manuel Pastor is Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the School of Civil Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM). He is a worldwide recognised expert in the field of Computational Geomechanics with a dilated experience in both mesh-based and mesh-free techniques for the simulation of engineering problems.

Expertise: Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics