RUB » Departments » Chair of Continuum Mechanics

The group of Daniel Balzani is active in developing methods for the continuum mechanical modeling and simulation of complex materials. Focus is on the development of scale-coupling numerical methods as well as new material models which enable the simulation of materials such as multiphase steels, textile membranes, soft biological tissues, fiber-concrete composites, or hardmetal composites by incorporating uncertainties at different scales. Increasingly, the experimental characterization of nonlinear material properties as well as the unique identification of material parameters become more important.

News of the group

The black belt of science

03.02.2023: On January 23rd, Dennis Wingender defended his thesis "Efficient Simulation of Brittle and Ductile Crack Propagation at Finite Strains through Metallic Microstructures based on Voxel Data". The thesis was awarded the highest grade with distinction. This means that Dennis W., a great friend of judo, now officially has a black belt in science.

The following journal publications were produced during his PhD studies: Simulation of crack propagation through voxel-based, heterogeneous structures based on eigenerosion and finite cells, Simulation of crack propagation based on eigenerosion in brittle and ductile materials subject to finite strains

22nd GAMM Seminar on Microstructures

26.01.2023: Maximilian Köhler, a staff member at the Chair of Continuum Mechanics at Ruhr-University Bochum, participated in the 22nd GAMM Microstructure Seminar and presented his talk titled "Advances in relaxed continuum damage mechanics at finite strains: Adaptive convexification and strain softening". The seminar was held at the TU Vienna. In the talk, he presented the new Reconvexify approach, which was recently published in this paper.
More

Africomp 2022 - Presentations in Capetown

02.11.2022: From the 2nd to 4th November 2022, the 5th African Conference on Computational Mechanics took place in Capetown, South Africa. The chair was represented by Dennis Wingender and Niklas Miska, who held presentations on their research topics and participated in the scientific exchange. Naturally, some time off the conference was used to explore the unique venue and its surroundings.

Presentations at the 9th GACM Colloquium on Computational Mechanics

21.09.2022: The 9th annual colloquium on continuum mechanics organised by the German Association for Computational Mechanics (GACM) took place from the 21st to 23rd of September. This event was jointly hosted by the Institute of Structural Analysis and the Institute of Mechanics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Dennis Ogiermann, Sharan Nurani Ramesh and Johannes Riesselmann presented their current work in the fields of biomechanics and gradient-enhanced mixed finite element methods.
More

Chair of Continuum Mechanics at the Annual Meeting of the International Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM'22, Aachen)

15.08.2022: 92nd Annual Meeting of the International Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM'22), which took place in Aachen from August 15 to 19, 2022, has successfully come to an end. The Chair of Continuum Mechanics presented a whole range of current research work, from biomechanics to higher-order models for microelectromechanical structures. The lecture program can be found under the following link. A total of 13 presentations were given: Experienced scientists and fresh doctoral students presented new scientific developments of the Chair. This was the first opportunity in the last two years to meet in the presence the entire "mechanical" community in Germany resulting in lively discussions about current scientific questions and potential cooperation. See you next year at the GAMM annual meeting in Dresden!
More

Presentations at the WCCM 2022

31.07.2022: This year's "15th World Congress on Computational Mechanis (WCCM)" (initially planned to take place in Yokohama) was held in online format again. Here, during the time period from 31. July to 05. August, Niklas Miska, Mehran Motevalli, Dennis Ogiermann, Johannes Riesselmann, Klemens Uhlmann and Dennis Wingender used the opportunity to present their current research results and get into the exchange of scientific ideas on the international stage.
More

International Symposium in honor of Professor Gerhard A. Holzapfel’s 60th birthday

30.06.2022: Biomechanics:
Challenges of the Next Decade, Graz, June 30 – July 1, 2022
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Daniel Balzani gives talk about Mesh-independent simulation of damage in soft biological tissues

Objectives of the symposium

Biomechanics is a challenging subject that studies living systems by means of the development, extension, and application of mechanics to better understand biological, engineering and medical phenomena. Nonlinear continuum mechanics, multiscale modeling, advanced 3D imaging techniques together with unprecedented predictive computational power allow us to solve cutting-edge biomechanics problems with rather complex patient-specific anatomies.
Interdisciplinary approaches that address phenomena at the nano-, micro-, or macro-levels are often required to solve such problems. Mechanics, natural sciences such as biophysics, biochemistry, and mathematics, as well as biomedical-, tissue-, health care-, computer- and biomolecular engineering sciences need to be combined with medicine to tackle real-world problems.
This symposium aims to gather the expertise of established and emerging scientists with backgrounds in the relevant areas of solid (bio)mechanics. It will highlight the state-of-the-art research in mathematical modeling, computational simulation, and experimental methods for testing of a range of biological tissues. In addition, it will highlight some major challenges of the next decade and how we can be better prepared for them.
More

SFB Closing Workshop and EuroTun 2021

21.06.2022: The closing workshop of the SFB 837 ''Interaction Modeling in Mechanized Tunneling" was held in the Convention Centre of the Ruhr-University Bochum. Afterwards, the conference ''EuroTun 2021: Computational Methods and Information Models in Tunneling" took place from the 22nd to the 24th of June at which Dennis Wingender and Daniel Balzani presented a talk with the title ''Simulation of crack propagation as major contributor to wear in hard metals using real microstructure data".

Presentations at ICoNSoM

13.06.2022: As one of the most beautiful conference destinations this year, Lubna Makhool, Dennis Wingender, Klemens Uhlmann und Prof. Daniel Balzani flew to Alghero, Sardinia and presented their research regarding nonlinear solid mechanics. Besides the scientific exchange with Prof. Zdeněk Bažant, Prof. Gerhard Holzapfel and others, they were able to enjoy the welcoming atmosphere and the sunny weather by extending their stay.
More

Presentation at the ECCOMAS 2022

05.06.2022: Maximilian Köhler gave a talk in Oslo at the ECCOMAS with the title "Multidimensional Rank-One Convexification of Incremental Damage Formulations: Algorithmic Treatment, Implementation Aspects, and Numerical Analysis". The presentation was created in collaboration with the mathematics cooperation partners from Augsburg Timo Neumeier, Daniel Peterseim and Malte A. Peter.

Within the talk it was shown how to construct multi dimensional rank-one convex envelopes and which properties they have within the application of continuum damage mechanics.

Contact

Ruhr-University Bochum
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Chair of Continuum Mechanics
Building IC Floor 03, room 741
P.O. Box No. 5
Universitätsstraße 150
44801 Bochum
Germany

Tel. +49 234 32-26048
Fax +49 234 32-14229

Mail: sekretariat@lkm.rub.de