Computational Modeling of Contact and Embedded Interfaces

The treatment of interfaces in computational modeling can take on a variety of forms: contact-impact, overlapping meshes, and embedded interfaces. This symposium focuses on the computational/numerical aspects of interface modeling and covers a variety of interface physics in the areas of solid and fluid mechanics, electromagnetics and thermal analysis. Specific instantiations may include: mechanical contact of dissimilar solid meshes often with friction, overlapping mesh methods such as immersed boundary techniques with fluid structure interaction and embedded interface techniques that deal with fracture or phase transformation at the material interfaces etc.

The computational modeling of interfaces demands a variety of special mathematical techniques including: spatial discretization approaches that may be stabilized and/or require Lagrange multipliers, implicit solution of resulting systems of equations using fast solvers, special time-integration schemes for impact dynamics, handling of moving meshes for fluid-structure implementation and special material considerations at the interface that may require unique continuum or multi-scale models.