Sep 2023
Fracture processes occur in different environments and define the lifespan of many engineering structures. To illustrate the effects of fracture in more detail one can think of its negative implications like failure of large structures, e.g. bridges, ships and vessels. Further instances are shattered glass, a broken leg, a ruptured aorta, a torn sail, a broken car part, a cracked beam among many others. Fracture processes can also be on purpose and useful as in chip forming during cutting, tearing open of packages along precut lines and breaking off of chocolate pieces. From a computational mechanics side, this talk will focus on the continuum phase-field approach to fracture, which is based on the regularization of sharp crack discontinuities. Due to its simplicity, this methodology has gained wide interest by the engineering community since 2008. From there on many scientists have worked in this field and developed phase-field approaches for finite elements, isogeometric analysis, and lately also for the virtual element technology. This presentation will present a set of recently developed numerical tools to address these challenges. The main driving force for these developments is the possibility to handle complex fracture phenomena within numerical methods in two and three dimensions.
Professor Dr.-Ing. habil. F. Aldakheel is since April 2023 professor for high performance computing at Leibniz Universität Hannover. After studying engineering in Aleppo, he initially worked at Alfurat University in Syria before moving to the Institute of Applied Mechanics at the University of Stuttgart for the master and Ph.D. studies and then the postdoc period. There he was course director for the international master's programme "Computational Mechanics of Materials and Structures" (COMMAS) as well as local director for the excellence programme "Erasmus Mundus Master of Science in Computational Mechanics". Most recently, he was Chief-Engineer/Group-Leader at the Institute for Continuum Mechanics at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Associate Professor (Honorary) at the Zienkiewicz Centre for Computational Engineering at Swansea University, UK. He has been awarded numerous awards, among them the Richard-von-Mises Prize of GAMM (Society of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics). His research interests are related to the modeling of material behaviors, variational principles, computational solid mechanics, structural mechanics, finite and virtual element methods, multiphysics and multi-scales problems, machine learning, energy transition and experimental validation.