(April 18, 2015) A
new paper by a team of researchers led by Karel Matous, College of Engineering
Associate Professor of Computational Mechanics in the Department of Aerospace
and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, describes how an
accurate statistical description of heterogeneous particulate materials, which
is used within statistical micromechanics theories, governs the overall
thermo-mechanical properties. This detailed statistical description was computed
using a novel adaptive interpolation/integration scheme on the nation’s largest
parallel supercomputers. Quantifying the morphology of many-body systems has
applications in many scientific fields at a variety of length scales from
molecular configurations up to structural composites and celestial bodies.