Konstantina Ntarladima joined the THREAD project in May 2000 as ESR8 under the supervision of Johannes Gerstmayr (UIBK). Her research on modelling and simulation techniques for ropeway and wire-rope reeving systems has been inspired by fascinating industrial applications, in THREAD known as Industrial challenge IC2 Mechanical Engineering.
Today, Konstantina is a R&D engineer at Hellenic Cables SA in Greece and will now return to Innsbruck to defend her PhD thesis on Modeling and simulation of highly flexible axially moving structures under contact. The public defence at University of Innsbruck, Technikerstr. 13, Room 326 will start on Thursday 9 July 2026 at 09:00 AM. A web meeting will be hosted in Zoom (Meeting-ID: 957 5924 9876, Code: 042824) and welcomes external participants, in particular from the THREAD network.
Konstantina Ntarladima has an impressive research record including three papers being directly related to her ESR project in THREAD. The papers have been published in renowned international journals with peer review like ASME Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics, Nonlinear Dynamics and Acta Mechanica and address challenging topics such as the modelling of contact and friction between beams under large deformation and sheaves and specific aspects of beams being modeled with arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian formulation. At UIBK, she has been an active member of Johannes Gerstmayr's group which has become known to a wide audience through its EXUDYN open source software project.
Konstantina presented her research results at various international conferences including the ECCOMAS Thematic Conferences on Highly Flexible Slender Structures. In 2023, she reported in a joint contribution with her THREAD supervisor Johannes Gerstmayr on Coupling of bending and axial motion in highly flexible axially moving beams modelled with ALE (HFSS 2023, Rijeka). Two years later, at HFSS 2025 in Kaiserslautern, she presented a Feasibility study for preliminary design of dynamic submarine power cables, that was prepared at her new affiliation Hellenic Cables SA in joint work with Nikolaos Mavrodontis and Stylianos Koumlis.
In autumn 2020, Konstantina was one of the first ESRs who were on secondment at a THREAD partner university. In a joint presentation with Jan Tomec (URFCE), she introduced the THREAD project to the audience of the Rijeka Science festival 2020. Her three-month secondment to THREAD's industrial partner LEITNER provided deep insight into research and development of ropeway systems. Her secondment to MLU in 2022 was not limited to research in mathematics and engineering, as Konstantina became - somewhat unexpectedly - one of the three ESR movie stars in THREAD's Living the project video.
@Konstantina: Your PhD defence will be the twelfth PhD defence held by the THREAD European Training Network. Good luck!