Congratulations to CIES Research Associate Dr Weiwei Xing
Congratulations to CIES Research Associate Dr Weiwei Xing for receiving a 2020 Dean’s Award for an outstanding PhD thesis.
The award is in recognition of his completed PhD thesis - A Scaled Boundary Finite Element Based Node-to-node Scheme for Contact Problems, supervised by CIES Centre director Professor Chongmin Song and Emeritus Professor Francis Tin Loi.
The Dean’s Award recognises the high quality higher degree research that is carried out at UNSW, and is awarded to PhD graduates who have produced a thesis that requires only minimal corrections, received outstanding and/or excellent levels of achievement for all examination criteria, and in the opinion of both examiners is in the top 10% of PhD theses they have examined.
About the thesis: The analysis of contact problems is a major concern in many engineering applications. It is one of the most difficult topics due to unknown contact areas and inequality constraints. For numerical simulations, the dissimilar discretization of contact interfaces is inevitable due to the tangential slippage in large sliding contact problems. Therefore, it is impossible to maintain the node-to-node (NTN) contact.
Various treatments have been proposed to enforce the contact constraints on nonmatching contact interfaces. Their implementations, however, either fail the patch test or require sophisticated algorithms and techniques.
Xing’s thesis presented a novel, and successful, NTN contact scheme based on the scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM).For further technical details see here .
