Indrajeet Patil was THREAD's ESR 2 who joined us in December 2020 to work under the supervision of Olivier Brüls at the University of Liège. Since the end of the THREAD project, he has continued his professional career at Fraunhofer ITWM, Kaiserslautern, but will now be back to Liège to defend his PhD thesis Towards a nonsmooth multibody finite element framework for braiding simulation. The defence on Wednesday 17 December 2025 at 16:00 CET is organised in hybrid mode and may be followed in person at Auditorium 02, Building B37 of ULG's Sart Tilman Campus or online at ULG's open PhD Channel, click here for up-to-date information.

Indrajeet's thesis is structured in the two parts Multibody systems with switching bilateral constraints and System-level modelling of braiding process and addresses a wide range of topics from theory to practical applications of multibody systems modelling and simulation. His research was inspired by THREAD's Industrial challenge IC1 Textile Engineering and by the cooperation with THREAD's partner organisations Centexbel and GDTech in Liège. Soon he realized that the system-level modelling of braiding processes results in a new type of non-smooth multibody system models. In June 2025, his research results on these switching bilateral constraints were published in the prestigious international journal Nonlinear Dynamics.

Indrajeet has been an active member of the THREAD team. In April 2024, he was part of the THREAD team from the University of Liège that presented its work on highly flexible structures at European Commission's annual science fair Science is Wonderful! at Brussels. In THREAD's news blog, he reported on the MaGIC 2022 workshop and on his secondments to Halle, Erlangen and to the industrial partners GDTech and Centexbel.

And what about the guitarist? Use your favourite search engine with the four keywords high, hopes, Indrajeet and Patil to find an outstanding video, sit back, and enjoy ...