Tom Hughes forms new ICES research group

[[ICES Professor Thomas J.R. Hughes has formed the new ICES Computational Mechanics Group, assembling researchers to focus on isogeometric analysis.

“In the few years since its inception, isogeometric analysis has become one of the most active research areas of computational mechanics, attracting investigators from mathematics, computer science and engineering,” says Hughes, professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, and holder of the Computational and Applied Mathematics Chair III. Read more.]]

A recently developed computational approach, isogeometric analysis offers the possibility of removing the design bottleneck that currently exists when converting data between Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) packages.

Both FEA and CAD are integral in designing everything from office buildings to computer chips, but the computational approach for each is different, slowing the translation between CAD and FEA models. The translation is a tedious, but essential step to analyze new designs during development.

To alleviate the problem, isogeometric analysis inserts the basic geometry of most CAD packages into the FEA application directly, allowing models to be designed, tested and adjusted in one go, using a common data set. Other current CMG research topics are catheter-based nanoparticle drug delivery systems, the growth and adaptation of cerebral and abdominal aneurysms, new numerical algorithms for phase field models with applications to multiphase flows and the growth of prostrate tumors; the basal boundary condition of the west Antarctic ice sheet; simulation of brittle and ductile fracture; and the development of new discretization technologies for computational structural mechanics and fluid dynamics, including T-splines, divergence- and curl-conforming B-splines, and boundary element methods, and immersed methods using T-spline surfaces and hierarchically refined B-spline volume discretizatons.