Nicolas Moës has been a University Professor at the École Centrale de Nantes since 2001 and a Belgian member of the Institut Universitaire de France since 2018.

iconeInfo A seminar by Mr Nicolas Moës entitled "Immaterial movements: theoretical and digital points of view" will take place on Friday 18 March from 11 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. in the Amphitheatres of Europe (B4).

Nicolas Moës OK 

He obtained an engineering degree (specialising in mechanics and physics) from the University of Liège in 1992. He worked on his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Professor Pierre Ladevèze at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan until 1996. He then left for five years of research in the United States, first under the direction of Professor Tinsley Oden, at the University of Texas in Austin, then under Professor Ted Belytschko, at Northwestern University in Illinois.

His work focuses on the mechanics of cracking, damage and contact. The X-FEM (eXtended Finite Element Method) approach that he initiated in 1999 in the United States with Ted Belytschko and John Dolbow has greatly simplified the simulation of crack propagation by finite elements. This method changes the paradigm of finite element fracture calculations by allowing crack propagation without modification of the underlying mesh.

The X-FEM method is also interesting for material interfaces and free surfaces by allowing calculations without explicit representation of these surfaces by the mesh.

More recently, with his team at Centrale Nantes, and within the framework of an ERC grant (2012-2017), he has developed a new theoretical model for the transition between damage mechanics and fracture mechanics, as well as an original treatment of the variational inequalities of the contact type. This work would go on to be awarded the ONERA-Mechanical Sciences prize for aeronautics and aerospace in 2019.

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