CSI:MM - Computational Science Investigation for Material Mechanics
Language of instruction: English
Link to Course Catalogue
Introduction to computational sciences with focus on numerical modeling of the mechanics of materials. Simulation of material damage and failure with advanced finite element methods.
Learning from mistakes and failures is as old as the engineering discipline. Understanding why things went wrong is essential for improvement, but often impossible without the help of numerical modelling. Real world problems are often highly nonlinear, dependent on multiple physical fields, involve fundamental material behavior far from equilibrium and reversibility, and can often only be understood by addressing different relevant scales.
In this course, we will use real-life cases to learn how to deal with such problems. Starting from the problem description with governing equations, you will learn how to tackle non-linear and multi-field problems using numerical simulations. A particular focus will be on fracture. Starting from the failed state, we will investigate potential causes and find the conditions that resulted in failure. For doing so, you will learn how to predict it with the Finite Element Method (FEM). To correctly assess failure, plastic behavior and size effects, originating from the underlying material microstructure, need to be considered. You will learn how to deal with plasticity in FEM and how you can get information from the heterogeneous material scale into your FEM framework.
Students work on a real failure case, formulate a failure hypothesis and program a small jupyter python notebook that could help in studying the failure hypothes and present it in the last lecture. The combination of failure case report, notebook and presentation makes 40% of the final grade, while a 30min. oral exam counts 60%.
The course is entirely hosted on moodle with all lecture materials.