Workshop on Computational Methods in Contact Mechanics
NUFRIC Project Workshop
Workshop on Computational Methods inContact Mechanics
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7 October 2005 90 Euro (+VAT 20%) |
Guest event of the TCN-CAE 2005 conference is a Workshop on Computational Methods in Contact Mechanics. The backbone of the workshop il the European Project NUFRIC (Numerical Based Medium Level Training on Industrial Friction Problems - see www.nufric.org), purpose of which is to help educate engineers in industry who wish to apply numerical methods to solve problems involving contact and friction. Software that is currently available makes it feasible to set up problems of this nature with comparative ease, but obtaining results that can be relied upon remains a challenging task that can require considerable knowledge and experience. The project aims to make this knowledge and experience more accessible to those who wish to acquire it.
Project results, as well as the corresponding scientific debate, are fully in agreement with the TCN mission/themes.
Contact mechanics, friction, wear, lubrication and adhesion (in short, tribology) are central to many engineering applications. Friction is one of the major causes of energy losses (most of the time undesired, except when we make use of friction to transmit loads or to control the motion), and it provides a never-ending source of fundamental problems in science, ranging from the smallest scales of nanotribology to the largest scales of earthquakes.
The study of friction can be traced back to Leonardo and Galileo, yet losses due to friction are still large factors in the energy budgets of developed countries. Because of both its practical importance and relevance to basic scientific questions, there has been a major increase in activity in the study of friction during the last decade. One aspect of concern is friction instabilities, which impact a wide range of scientific and industrial applications, from earthquakes to rubber-like materials, to generation of noise and vibration in brakes (`squeal'). These are found not just if the coefficient of friction is a decreasing function of speed (at nanoscales, the opposite may also be true) but even with constant friction.
Formulation and analysis of problems require some mathematical understanding of the possible problems of non-existence and non-uniqueness, which sometimes are intrinsic in the problem, and sometimes are due to numerical inaccuracy. Special numerical methods are required. Some subjects discussed in the workshop will be: algorithms, mesh adaptivity, parallelization, time-stepping, modeling approaches and applications, error-estimates , optimization and control problems.
Applications of contact mechanics in this workshop span from rolling contact, crash, thermoelastic and dynamic instabilities of friction in brakes/clutch systems, the problem of rollaway, the study of models for contacting rough surfaces, forming processes, crash tests, powder materials, etc.
Hence, we shall cover a wide spectrum of state of the art theoretical and experimental investigations on fundamental properties of tribology at scales ranging from nano/micro to macroscopic scales.