Master’s theses/ HiWi

Master’s theses

Multiscale Elasto-dynamics

Description

Now a days, considerable progress is being made in the design of composite materials which can exhibit properties that are not found in naturally occurring materials. Numerical homogenization techniques are used in order to find effective properties of periodic microstructures at the macro-scale. In conventional homogenization methods, the material properties are averaged over a repeating Representative Volume Element (RVE) in order to calculate those effective properties. But in the case of elastodynamics, uniform volume averaging can lead to a loss of phase information which is necessary to accurately describe the elastodynamic material at the macro-scale. Such limitations can be overcome by transferring the microscale information to the fourier space and then projecting the frequency modes to a reduced space composing a few selected Floquet-Bloch eigenmodes, thereby reducing the degrees of freedom at the macro-scale. The homogenized parameters can then be utilized in a material optimization setting, thus optimizing the dynamic properties of the structure.

„A general multiscale framework for the emergent effective elastodynamics of metamaterials“ – A. Sridhar, V.G. Kouznetsova, M.G.D. Geers

Objective

To develop a multiscale method for elasto-dynamic simulation using homogenization in the fourier domain.

Prerequisites

Good knowledge of numerics of partial differential equations, mathematical optimization, programming in MATLAB/Python/C++ and a lot of enthusiasm.
Language: English or German

Tasks

• Literature research
• Model development
• Numerical experimentation
• Writing Thesis and dissemination of the results.

Structural optimization of acoustic metamaterial

In cooperation with the Institute of Mechanics and Mechatronics/ TU-Wien (Prof. Kaltenbacher) we are offering a topic in the field of designing acoustic metamaterial. The thesis may involve experiments in Vienna (travel expenses provided). Especially suited for students of computation engineering. Prerequisite „Introduction to Structural Optimization“ or similar lectures.

Additive manufacturing

We have a long history in collaborative research projects with respect to additive manufacturing. Contact us if you are interested to get involved in this emerging field. For students of mathematics and computational engineering.

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Solar air heaters are fascinating simple, cheap and efficient devices for environmental friendly ventilation and heating. Yet, solar air heaters are widely unknown in western countries.

Based on an existing numerical setup for a coupled flow/heat model, certain properties can be structurally optimized by means of gradient based optimization.

HiWi jobs

We are constantly looking for dedicated students starting from Bachlor level to work on small scientific projects in our group. If you are interested in optimization, numerics and challenging applications and have some income on a regular base, please contact us. For students of mathematics and computational engineering.

Topology optimization and 3D Printing: assistance in project-related work

The project’s focus is the development of a new multi-axis additive manufacturing technology with continuous fibers. Our contribution is the design of optimized components with applications in the aircraft industry. One current challenge is the translation of these designs into actual fibers and printing sequences for the manufacturer.
For this purpose, we are looking for assistance to acquire
existing approaches from literature for solving this problem.
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