Note

If you are considering a thesis work under my supervision I encourage you to talk directly with me.
However, if you are lurking around, then the following lists should give you a rough idea of the thesis I could follow.
As you will notice many of them are numerical; there is nevertheless room for some experimental activity.

Thesis requiring programming activity are marked with (P); those requiring analytical developments are marked with (A).

Structural and computational mechanics

Students willing to improve their knowledge on structural and/or computational mechanics can consider the following non-exhaustive list of subjects.

  • Characterization of beam constitutive laws (P and/or A)
  • Development of improved beam FEs (P)
  • Characterization of shell constitutive laws (PA)
  • Development of improved shell FEs (P)
  • Vibration of beams and shells (P and/or experimental)
    • with active control for vibration and noise suppression
  • Functionally graded materials
  • Meshfree methods (P)
  • X-FEM (P and/or A)
  • Isogeometric FEs (P and/or A)
  • Spectral methods (P and/or A)
  • FE code parallelization (P)
  • Automatic FE code generation (P)
    • with special emphasis on plasticity and damage consitutive laws (P and A)
  • Multibody/CFD coupling (P)
  • Non-local constitutive laws (P and A)
  • Polar materials (P and A)
  • Homogeneization (P and A)
  • Multiscale simulations (P and A)
  • Modeling of damage (P and A)
  • Peridynamics (P)
  • Modeling of filament winding (P and A)
  • Numerical methods for the study of structural instabilities (P and A)

Multibody

Thesis dealing with multibody models do not necessarily require programming (P) or analytical (A) skills.

  • Friction modeling (P)
  • Contact algorithms (P)
  • Coupling of standard multibody code with Modelica (P)
  • Multibody/CFD coupling (P)
  • Landing gears modeling
    • with emphasis on tire modeling (P)
    • with emphasis on stability (P and/or A)
  • Active control of landing gears (ABS and dampers)
  • Limit cycles (A)
  • Multirate and multialgorithms time integration (P and/or A)
  • Simulation / experimental work on of flapping wing robots
  • Control of underactuated systems

Active telescopes

  • Advanced models of deformable secondary mirrors (P and A)
  • Parallelization of the simulation code (on GPU?) (P)
  • Numerical / experimental correlation
  • Experimental characterization and numerical modeling of thin plates structural damping

Optimization

  • Topological optimization (P)
  • Filament winding (P)
  • Optimization under uncertainties (P)

Graphics

  • Development of a post-processor for multibody simulations performed with MBDyn (P)