Krishnaswamy Ravi-Chandar

Krishnaswamy Ravi-Chandar

Krishnaswamy Ravi-Chandar
The University of Texas Austin US

Dr. Krishnaswamy Ravi-Chandar received his B. S. degree in Physics from Bangalore University, Diploma of the Madras Institute of Technology with Honors (Aeronautical Engineering), M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology.

He has been at The University of Texas at Austin since 2000. Dr. Ravi-Chandar’s research interests are in the general area of mechanics of materials, with particular emphasis on fracture and failure.

He has over 130 publications in journals and books on different aspects of mechanics: dynamic fracture, ductile failure, fragmentation, friction, mechanical response of metals, polymers, and shape memory alloys. Dr. Ravi-Chandar is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Fracture.

He served as President of the International Congress on Fracture (2005-2009). He has been elected as a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Society for Experimental Mechanics, the American Academy of Mechanics and the International Congress on Fracture. He received the Murray Medal from the Society for Experimental Mechanics in 2004.

Research stay at UC3M: DEPARTMENT OF CONTINUUM MECHANICS AND STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

Project: During the course of the Chair of Excellence 2013-2014, Professor Ravi-Chandar will undertake, through the close collaboration with the colleagues in the research group at the University of Carlos III, experimental and theoretical studies of fracture at multiple length and time scales. After many decades of investigations, fracture remains as a problem that is difficult to solve quantitatively. Despite their great importance, many fundamental problems in fracture simulations remain unsolved. The experimental difficulty lies in the fact that fracture intrinsically involves many scales; length scales ranging from Angstroms to meters, and time scales ranging from picoseconds to years. The computational difficulty involves different aspects: the size of the problems is usually quite large; the discretization of the problem for numerical solutions introduces artifacts such as mesh dependence of the fracture paths and fracture energy; the ever-changing geometry resulting from crack propagation necessitates updating the discretization at every time step, and others. A final goal is to develop experimentally validated mesoscale models that can be employed in the simulation/prediction of fracture initiation, fracture energy, crack paths, crack arrest and fracture velocities.

Stay period: MAR 2014 - AUG 2014