Section: Application Domains

Mechanical Engineering

Many physicists and mathematicians have strived for centuries to understand the principles governing those complex mechanical phenomena, providing a number of continuous models for slender structures, granular matter, and frictional contact. In the XX${}^{\mathrm{th}}$ century, industrial applications such as process automatization and new ways of transportation have boosted the fields of Mechanical Engineering and Computer-Aided Design, where material strength, reliability of mechanisms, and safety, standed for the main priorities. Instead, large displacements of structures, buckling, tearing, or entanglement, and even dynamics, were long considered as undesirable behaviors, thus restraining the search for corresponding numerical models.

Only recently, the engineering industry has shown some new and growing interest into the modeling of dynamic phenomena prone to large displacements, contact and friction. For instance, the cosmetology industry is more and more interested in understanding the nonlinear deformation of hair and skin, with the help of simulation. Likewise, auto and aircraft manufacturers are facing new challenges involving buckling or entanglement of thin structures such as carbon or optical fibers; they clearly lack predictive, robust and efficient numerical tools for simulating and optimizing their new manufacturing process, which share many common features with the large-scale simulation scenarii traditionally studied in Computer Graphics applications.