Events

Dr. John Foster, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio will give a talk entitled "Peridynamics as a unified theory for the mechanics of heterogeneous media, anomalous porous flow, and fracture" as part of the Claude R. Hocott Graduate Seminar Series.

Bio: Dr. Foster is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Texas at San Antonio. Before arriving at UTSA in the Fall of 2011 he was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in the Terminal Ballistics Technology Department at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM where he worked for 7 years. He has a PhD from Purdue University. In 2013 was as an AFOSR Young Investigator. During his nearly 10 year career in research he was involved in many projects ranging from full scale projectile penetration field tests, to laboratory experiments using Kolsky bars, to modeling and simulation efforts using some of the world’s largest computers. His research interest include impact and damage mechanics, dynamic behavior of materials and dynamic fracture, computational mechanics, and the peridynamic theory of solid mechanics.

Abstract: The study of deforming continuous media is a well developed branch of solid mechanics which relies on models that assume displacements within the media are sufficiently smooth such that they can be modeled with partial differential equations. However, observations of nature show that some displacements exist where the spatial partial derivatives cannot be evaluated, most notably at the tip of a moving crack. The peridynamic theory of solid mechanics (peridynamics) utilizes models that do not require the existence of spatial derivatives and seeks to unify the mechanics of continuous and discontinuous media. Peridynamics has shown usefulness in the modeling material failure due to fracture without the need redefine the media of interest to exclude the cracks. Recently, ideas borrowed from peridynamics have been applied to modeling convection-diffusion with applications to porous media. This seminar will introduce the audience to peridynamic theory, including a discussion of how non-locality at macroscales arises due to modeling decisions that exclude heterogeneity in microstructures and can lead interesting phenomena such as characteristic length-scales in solid media and anomalous dispersion in fluid flow. Examples and applications related to geomechanics will be shown.