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Title:
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COMPUTATIONAL METHODS FOR MICRO AND NANO SYSTEMS

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Organizers:
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Alberto Corigliano
alberto.corigliano@polimi.it
Department of Structural Engineering, Politecnico di Milano.
Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133, Milano, Italy.

Horacio Espinosa
espinosa@northwestern.edu,
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University.
2145 Sheridan Road  Evanston, IL 60208, USA.

Joost Vlassak
vlassak@esag.harvard.edu
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

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Minisymposium description:
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Micro and Nano Electro Mechanical Systems have recently attracted much attention 
from the industry and from the scientific community. MEMS are nowadays routinely 
met in various fields like in the automotive, aerospace and large consumer applications.

It can be said that for various micro systems the pioneering phase has been substituted 
by a phase of industrial applications. Hence, new challenges concerning reliability, 
optimization and increasing miniaturizations must be tackled by the designers. All 
these issues need a multi-disciplinary approach and must be supported by multi-physics 
numerical and experimental analyses able to contribute to the definition of a unified 
design and analysis methodology of MEMS and NEMS.

It is the purpose of the proposed mini-symposium to focus on the most recent developments 
in the fields of numerical methods for the simulation of the mechanical responses of 
MEMS and NEMS. Particular attention will be devoted to procedures able to merge experiments 
and simulations and to help in assessing the reliability of micro and nano systems.

Issues like micro fluidics, damping, topology optimization, nanoscale simulations, fracture, 
poly-crystal simulations will all be of interest in the symposium.