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Title:
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Multiscale Modeling of Materials
In honor of Prof. Kaspar J. Willam's 65th birthday

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Organizers:
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Ellen Kuhl
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
TU Kairserslautern
D-67653 Kaiserslautern, GERMANY
ekuhl@rhrk.uni-kl.de

Ekkehard Ramm
Institute of Structural Mechanics
University of Stuttgart
D-70550 Stuttgart, GERMANY
ramm@ibb.uni-stuttgart.de 

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Minisymposium description:
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Multiscale modeling of materials has advanced to a research topic of growing interested
in the past decades. This trend is driven by the desire to characterize the material
behavior, in particular in the context of material failure, as accurately as possible by
looking at the characteristic substructure of the material on smaller scales. A typical
example are granular media which can be described through phenomenological continuum
theories on the macroscopic level while discrete particle interaction theories provide
further insight in their complex failure phenomena on the microscopic level.

Bridging the gap between the different scales is one of the most challenging problems in
multiscale modeling. From a computational point of view, this task can be accomplished in
two different ways: the individual scales can either be coupled horizontally or
vertically. In the former approach, which could be thought of as a kind of model
adaptivity, the material characterization is refined in regions of particular interest,
e.g. in potential failure zones, while the remaining part of the structure is still
modeled on the phenomenological level. The vertical coupling approach is maybe more
common in material modeling. While continuum-based strategies like the finite element
method can be applied to simulate the material behavior on the macroscopic scale,
discrete element techniques, particle methods or dislocation dynamics are typically
applied to characterize the material response on the microscopic scale. The vertical
coupling thus essentially aims at defining appropriate analytical or numerical
homogenization techniques to carry discrete microscopic information up to the macroscopic
phenomenological level. 

Within this mini-symposium, we encourage abstracts related to the following key issues:
       
 * Micromechanically motivated constitutive models.
 * Higher order continuum theories.
 * Discrete element simulations of different failure phenomena.
 * Enhanced finite element techniques to simulate overall structural failure.
 * Multifield aspects of material failure.
 * Model adaptivity.
 * Computational homogenization techniques.
 * Experimental validation and parameter identification.