On a warm, sunny November day Davide Manfredo arrived in Halle to complete his PhD project at Martin Luther University (MLU). Five years before, in April 2020, he joined Fraunhofer ITWM in Kaiserslautern to study as THREAD's ESR11 simulation techniques for inelastic Cosserat rods and to investigate their effective constitutive properties (supervisors: Joachim Linn and Vanessa Dörlich). Today, he continues his successful work on cable simulation and related topics at THREAD's industrial partner fleXstructures GmbH.

Davide has been enrolled in MLU's PhD programme in mathematics and submitted in early 2025 his PhD thesis on Modelling and simulation of constitutive inelastic effects in composite cables by means of Prandtl-Ishlinskii operators. The defence on Thursday 13 November 2025 at 16:15 CET is organised in hybrid mode and may be followed in person at lecture room HS 1.04, Von-Seckendorff-Platz 1, Halle (Saale) or online via BigBlueButton (https://mluconf.uni-halle.de/b/fel-s3l-6da-leq, no password required).

In his research, Davide focussed on electric cables and cable like structures with a characteristic multi-material composition. Their complex hysteretic behaviour is of relevant interest in the modelling and simulation of multi-wire cable structures for automotive applications (IC 3). He developed a Prandtl-Ishlinskii hysteresis operator of stop type as constitutive law for describing the bending moment vs. bending curvature relationship in plane bending simulations.

Davide presented his research results successfully at various international conferences and published in 2024 a paper on Data based constitutive modelling of rate independent inelastic effects in composite cables using Preisach hysteresis operators in Multibody System Dynamics. In a joint work with Mohammad Ali Saadat (ESR6 at CentraleSupélec), he compared the hysteresis operator approach to a rheological model for the inelastic constitutive behaviour of multi-layer spiral strands.

Davide contributed actively to THREAD's social media activities. Enjoy, e.g., his news posts on secondments to IPS AB (industrial partner of THREAD) in 2021, to CentraleSupélec in 2022 and to MLU in 2023.

With this defence, your THREAD activities will come to an end, Davide. Il bocca al lupo and all the best from all of us.