May 21 – 25, 2018. Pavia, Italy

The main objective of this course is to provide engineers, graduate students, and researchers with a review of numerical techniques and solution algorithms for nonlinear mechanics. It presents the current state-of-the-art in finite element modeling of nonlinear problems in solid and structural mechanics and illustrates difficulties (and possible solutions) appearing in a number of applications.
Different sources of nonlinear behavior are presented in a systematic manner. Special attention is paid to nonlinear constitutive behavior of materials, large deformations and rotations of structures, contact and instability problems with either material (localization) or geometric (buckling) nonlinearities, which are needed to fully grasp weaknesses of structural design.

The course will also provide insight both on advanced mathematical aspects as well as into the practical aspects of several computational techniques, such as the finite element method, isogeometric analysis, meshless techniques, virtual element method.

The objective is thus to provide the participants with a solid basis for using computational tools and software in trying to achieve the optimal design, and/or to carry out a refined analysis of nonlinear behavior of structures. The course finally provides a basis to account for multi-physics and multi-scale effects, which are likely to achieve a significant breakthrough in a number of industrial applications.

Besides lectures, tutorials will be organized as a final section each day and are meant not as a standard lecture but as an interactive part of the course. In fact, tutorials will be based on addressing simple problems to be solved on the fly as a basis for an interactive discussion between the teaching body and the course attendees.

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