MSE Colloquium: Soheil Soghrati, A Mesh-Independent Finite Element Method for the Automated Treatment of Problems with Complex Microstructure

Ass't Professor, Dept of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The Ohio State University

Abstract

The laborious and time-consuming process of modeling problems with complex and/or evolving morphologies is one of the major challenges in the field of computational mechanics, which can either prohibit the application of conventional techniques such as the standard finite element method (FEM) or result in oversimplified models that neglect important morphological details. In this presentation, I introduce a hierarchical interface-enriched FEM (HIFEM) and its application for the mesh-independent simulation of problems with intricate microstructures. The HIFEM can accurately capture field/gradient discontinuities associated with the presence of materials interfaces that are in a close proximity or contact, while using finite element meshes that are completely independent of the domain geometry. This is made possible through special hierarchical enrichments that can easily be formulated for non-conforming elements cut by multiple materials interfaces, which also yields a similar precision and convergence rate as those of the standard FEM using a conforming mesh. The HIFEM will also be integrated with a virtual microstructural characterization algorithm to automatically construct discretized models of complex material microstructures. This algorithm can easily incorporate geometrical features extracted from digital data such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) images to create realistic models of the problem microstructure. This enables the automated construction of multiple synthesized models of heterogeneous materials systems and performing mesh-independent HIFEM simulations to statistically quantify the impact of microstructural uncertainties on their physical behavior. This work presents the application of this integrated computational module for simulating the thermal and mechanical responses of varying heterogeneous and composite materials systems, with especial focus on simulating the multiscale damage evolution in heterogeneous adhesives.

 

Bio

 

Dr. Soheil Soghrati is an assistant professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering & Materials Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University. He earned his PhD in Structural Engineering with minor in Computational Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, during which he held a graduate research assistantship at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He received both his Masters and Bachelor degrees in Civil Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology (Iran) and a certification of Advanced Structural Engineering and Computer Aided Analysis from Bauhaus University (Germany). Dr. Soghrati joined the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at OSU in June 2013 with a joint appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He is also one of the steering board faculty members in the Simulation Innovation and Modeling Center (SIMCenter). Dr. Soghrati’s research interests lay in the area of computational solid mechanics with especial focus on the development and implementation of advanced finite element and meshfree methods for the treatment of problems with complex and/or evolving morphologies. He is currently the director of the Automated Computational Mechanics Laboratory (ACML) at OSU, where he and members of his research group study varying computational problems in materials science, automotive, manufacturing, and biomechanics.