----- Title: ----- Partition of unity finite element and meshless methods: Advances and engineering applications. In honor of Prof. Tinsley Oden 70th birthday. ----------- Organizers: ----------- Carlos Armando Duarte e-mail: caduarte@uiuc.edu Phone: (1)(217) 244-2830 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department Civil and Environmental Engineering 2122 Newmark Laboratory MC 250 205 North Mathews Av. Urbana, Illinois 61801 USA Angelo Simone e-mail: a.simone@tudelft.nl Phone: +31-(0)15-278-5463 Delft University of Technology Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences Stevinweg 1 2628 CN Delft the Netherlands Theofanis Strouboulis e-mail: fanis01@hotmail.com Phone: (1)(979) 845-1676 Texas A&M University Department of Aerospace Engineering 746B H.R. BRIGHT BUILDING 3141 TAMU College Station, TX 77843-3141 John Dolbow e-mail: jdolbow@duke.edu Phone: (1)(919) 660-5202 Duke University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Box 90287 Hudson Hall Durham, NC 27708-0287 ------------------------- Minisymposium description: ------------------------- Partition of unity finite element and meshless methods have gained considerable interest in the engineering community because of undoubtful advantages over traditional spatial discretization approaches. Indeed, the use of tailored enrichment functions and the freedom of mesh-free analysis have spurred the use of these two approaches in a wide range of application domains. This mini-symposium aims at bringing together engineers, researchers and scientists to discuss advances of theoretical and technological nature and to exchange ideas, results and applications in these two broad families of computational methods. We invite submissions that focus on applications and new developments of partition of unity finite element methods, like generalized FEM and extended FEM, and meshless methods, like Diffuse Element Method, Element-Free Galerkin Method, hp-Clouds and Reproducing Kernel Particle Method. Applications to the mechanics of fracture mechanisms, description of failure mechanisms ranging from the macro to the micro scale, multiscale problems, and advanced microstructural analysis, are particularly welcome.