The International Conference on Highly Flexible Slender Structures will be held between 25 and 29 of September 2023 at the University of Rijeka, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Rijeka, Republic of Croatia. The conference will be organised as an ECCOMAS (European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences) Thematic Conference and an IACM (International Association for Computational Mechanics) Special Interest Conference.
The focus of the conference is on structural systems and their parts or elements which are both exposed to large overall structural deformation (highly flexible) and characterised by a geometry with one structural dimension considerably larger than the other two (slender). The conference will see researchers in the areas of mechanical modelling, mathematical formulations and numerical methods for highly flexible slender structures meet and address major challenges in theoretical and numerical analysis as well as industrial applications including open-source simulation and software development.
The topics to be discussed during the conference involve advanced concepts in experimental and theoretical structural mechanics, contact problems and non-smooth dynamics, computational geometry, discretisation methods and geometric numerical integration including the newest advances in numerical formulations on non-linear manifolds. The above topics will be discussed during the general programme and within mini-symposia focussing on constitutive modelling, contact mechanics, geometric integration, coupling of beams and solids, textile and fibrous materials, layered structures, as well as those addressing the importance of modernising graduate-level curricula in modelling slender structures and celebrating the role of Prof. M. Saje in the development of computational mechanics in civil engineering faculties in Ljubljana and Rijeka (read more, in Slovenian).
The conference is organised as a terminal network-wide training event in the course of the Horizon 2020 MSCA Innovative Training Network THREAD on highly flexible slender structures for industrial applications, which has run from September 2019 and involved ten universities, one research institute and one small industrial enterprise from Austria, Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Norway, Slovenia and Spain as well as a number of industrial partners from most of these countries as well as Finland, Italy and Sweden. THREAD has assembled more than a dozen early-stage researchers and provided them with comprehensive training in the above research topics as well as valuable transferable skills. A couple of conference sessions will be thus specifically devoted to young researchers, in which appropriate courses will be given for the continuation of their career in academia as well as industry.
Eight eminent scientists of all generations coming from the most prestigious research centres in Europe and America renowned for providing cutting-edge scientific contributions in numerical modelling of highly flexible slender structures are invited to the conference as plenary speakers. The currently active early-stage researchers of the THREAD project as well as all THREAD early-stage researchers who have already completed successfully their 36 month ESR projects plan to report on recent research results (read more).
Based on a press release of University of Rijeka