Seminar overview

The seminar took place in May 2009 and will be repeated in 2010. We leave all information of the seminar in 2009 unchanged until a date in 2010 is appointed.

Seminar title: The Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM)
Date: May 11–13, 2009
Place: Braunschweig, Germany
Organizers: Dr.-Ing. Thomas-Peter Fries   &   Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Zilian

Outline

This is the third annual seminar on the XFEM following previous seminars in Braunschweig in January 2007 and Aachen in May 2008.

The extended finite element method (XFEM)

Standard numerical methods like the FEM and FVM are widely established in today's engineering practice. They are well-suited for the approximation of smooth solutions. However, in the real world, there is an infinite number of examples where field quantities do not behave smoothly but show jumps, kinks, singularities etc. For example in solids, stresses and strains are discontinuous along material interfaces and singular at crack tips. In fluids, pressure and density change rapidly near shocks and the velocity gradient can be extremely large in boundary layers.

In contrast to standard numerical methods, the XFEM enables the approximation of non-smooth solutions with optimal accuracy. This is achieved by a local enrichment of the approximation space such that the special solution properties are considered appropriately. The XFEM is in the focus of intensive research activities and is currently realized in commerical finite element software tools.

Further information

Further information about this seminar is available here:

You may directly read these information via the links on the left.

Dr.-Ing. Thomas-Peter Fries, Chair for Computational Analysis of Technical Systems (CATS),
RWTH Aachen University, Schinkelstr. 2, 52062 Aachen, Germany. Email: fries@cats.rwth-aachen.de
Tel. +49 (0)241 80 99930, Fax +49 (0)241 80 92910