Invited Talk - Phase-field modeling of fracture and fatigue:an overview of main results and open issues

Prof. Laura De Lorenzis from ETH Zürich (Switzerland) will give an invited talk on Friday 8th September 2023 on Phase-field modeling of fracture and fatigue:an overview of main results and open issues.

Abstract

The phase-field modeling approach to fracture has recently attracted a lot of attention due to its remarkable capability to naturally handle fracture phenomena with arbitrarily complex crack topologies in three dimensions. On one side, the approach can be obtained through the regularization of the variational approach to fracture introduced by Francfort and Marigo in 1998, which is conceptually related to Griffith's view of fracture; on the other side, it can be constructed
as a gradient damage model with some specific properties.
In this talk, the speaker gives a brief overview of the phase-field approach to fracture, of recent and ongoing related research in her group (including the extension to fatigue), and of the main open issues.

Bio

Laura De Lorenzis received her Engineering degree and her PhD from the University of her hometown Lecce, in southern Italy, where she first stayed as Assistant and later as Associate Professor of Solid and structural mechanics.

In 2013 she moved to the TU Braunschweig, Germany, as Professor and Director of the Institute of Applied Mechanics. There she was founding member and first Chair (2017-2020) of the Center for Mechanics, Uncertainty and Simulation in Engineering. Since 2020 she is Professor of Computational Mechanics at ETH Zürich. She was visiting scholar in several renowned institutions, including Chalmers University of Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (as holder of a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006), the Leibniz University of Hannover (with an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 2010-2011), the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Cape Town. She is the recipient of several prizes, including the RILEM L’Hermite Medal 2011, the AIMETA Junior Prize 2011, the IIFC Young Investigator Award 2012, the Euromech Solid Mechanics Fellowship 2022, two best paper awards and two student teaching prizes. In 2011 she was awarded a European Research Council Starting Researcher Grant. She has authored or co-authored more than 140 papers on international journals on different topics of computational and applied mechanics.

Multi-Scale Mechanics group (PI Dr Francesco Maresca), CMME, ENTEG, cordially invites everyone interested to attend.