A special lecture took place in the Lodge given by Dr Anastasia Dobroskok from the Geological Engineering Department at the University of North Dakota in the USA, entitled “When a molehill becomes a mountain”.
Anastasia graduated as a Mechanical Engineer from the well known St Petersburg State Technical University and obtained her PhD at the Institute for Mechanical Engineering Research in the same city.
In recent years, various fields of science became focused on studying the internal structure of different media. This tendency is particularly distinctive in material sciences, micromedia, mechanics of composites, biomechanical engineering and many others.
Anastasia’s lecture addressed a new way to study those fields and simulate effective properties of a material. Her method accounts for two major factors responsible for macroscopic irreversible deformations. These are i) crack growth and coalescence and ii) irreversible deformations on contacts. She has developed special numerical procedures to trace changes on internal level of material structure.
Anastasia presented a series of applications during her lecture which demonstrated the efficiency and accuracy of her method and the numerical procedures she has developed.
Her work is of great interest to the Industrial Research Division of WIT which has produced a series of computer codes based on boundary elements. Anastasia’s presentation gave rise to lively discussion.
Wessex Institute