It has been an amazing journey with Indrajeet (ESR 2), Konstantina (ESR 8) and Ergys (ESR 5) together for the secondment in Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in Halle (Saale), Germany. Each of the ESRs worked diligently in their part of doing collaborative research work, along with taking back great memories together from social events. Prof. Martin Arnold was there to support their research works with precious tips and suggestions.
Indrajeet brought an interesting challenge of non-differentiable boundary conditions for a beam (discontinuous angular velocity) which introduced unwanted numerical oscillations. Being a characteristic problem in nonsmooth mechanics in the context of impacts/collisions, certain numerical time integration schemes specifically designed to be robust in handling such nonsmooth events shall be further used.
Konstantina worked in collaboration with Prof. Martin Arnold on an efficient calculation of contact points between circular objects and beams using the Bezier representation of the cubic polynomials used for interpolating the nodes of beam finite elements. She also had the opportunity to give an introductory presentation on EXUDYN.
Furthermore, Ergys was working in close collaboration with Denise (ESR 1). This is part of an ongoing joint work of the groups from Trondheim and Halle on contractivity on Riemannian manifolds. Denise will then visit NTNU for a few days in the beginning of June to follow up this work.
In the beginning of the secondment, the three ESRs had the chance to give introductory talks to their research and concluded with another presentation where they talked about the obtained results during this period.
The three guest ESRs had the chance to spend a few hours all together and Denise showed them around Halle on an Easter market day.
Several social events took place during this period. Lunch with typically Indian food, dinner with music, visit of Prof. Johannes Gerstmayr in Halle and visits to nearby cities like Dresden, Prague and Berlin are among the fun memories the ESRs took with them at the end of the secondment period.
A unique experience for Denise, Ergys and Konstantina was the filming of a short TV contribution about THREAD.
The ESRs are so happy to have spent this time together and are looking forward to other THREAD gatherings. Finally, Konstantina, Indrajeet and Ergys would like to thank the host institution, in particular the group of Numerical Analysis for the fruitful discussions and the warm hospitality.
contributed by Indrajeet Patil (ESR 2), Ergys Çokaj (ESR 5) and Konstantina Ntarladima (ESR 8)