Best PhD Thesis in Applied and Computational Mechanics 2022 was awarded to LAETA Researcher

The doctoral work entitled «Towards Data-driven Multi-scale Optimization of Thermoplastic Blends: Microstructural Generation, Constitutive Development and Clustering-based Reduced-Order Modeling» won the award for Best PhD Thesis in Applied and Computational Mechanics 2022 granted by APMTAC – Portuguese Association for Applied Theoretical and Computational Mechanics.

The award-winning thesis was authored by Bernardo Ferreira, an FCT PhD fellow at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, and hosted at INEGI. It was supervised by Professor Francisco Pires, Integrated Member of LAETA, and co-supervised by Miguel Bessa.

This doctoral research project consisted of the development of several computational tools that, when properly integrated, allow the design and optimization of composite materials through artificial intelligence. In particular, these tools are capable of creating reliable computational models of the microstructure of the material that mathematically describe the mechanical behavior of the different constituents, and, hence, efficiently generate databases of the effective response of the material.