Recent Advances in the Material Point Method (MPM) for Simulation-Based Engineering Science (SBES)

Zhen Chen

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Core Faculty of the Nuclear Engineering Program

University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211-2200, USA

Due to the limitation of experimental techniques available and the need for cost-effective designs, Simulation-Based Engineering and Science (SBES) is playing an increasingly important role in engineering practice. For example, the development of SBES is essential in understanding and predicting the multiscale structural responses subject to extreme loading conditions. In this presentation, an introduction will be given on model-based simulation of structural failure responses subjected to impact, blast and fragment loadings, with the Material Point Method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_Point_Method) which is an extension from Computational Fluid Dynamics to Computational Solid Dynamics. Since quasi-brittle materials such as concrete and rock are commonly used in the infrastructures, modeling and computational aspects of these engineering materials will also be discussed, with a focus on the post-peak responses that might involve multi-physical phenomena. In addition, recent research results on multiscale simulation of bio and nano structural responses will be shown to further demonstrate the potential of SBES in promoting international interdisciplinary research and education in Civil Engineering in particular, and engineering and science in general.

Dr. Zhen Chen is a C.W. LaPierre Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Missouri (MU). His research area is in Computation Mechanics with a recent focus on multiscale model-based simulation of the multi-physical phenomena involved in structural failure subjected to extreme loading conditions.

Before joining MU in 1995, Dr. Chen was a design engineer in Shanghai Medical Electronics Factory, a professional staff member in the Applied Mechanics Division at New Mexico Engineering Research Institute as well as in the Department for the Waste Isolation Pilot Project/Performance Analysis Code Development at Sandia National Laboratories.

Dr. Chen has more than 250 publications based on funded research projects. He serves on Advisory Editorial Board of the International Journal for Multiscale Computational Engineering and Board of Editors of CMES: Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, respectively. Among his honors and awards are the Fellow of ASME, the Yangtze Visiting Chair Professor at DUT appointed by the Ministry of Education in China, the Faculty Research Award in the College of Engineering at MU, the Outstanding Youth Award (Oversea) from the Natural Science Foundation of China, and the NSF-CAREER Award in the USA. He received his Ph.D. degree in solid and computational mechanics from the University of New Mexico in 1989.