Laura De Lorenzis, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, Deputy Head of Dept. of Mechanical and Process Engineering, Deputy Head of Institute of Mechanical Systems
ETH Zürich

Abstract: Variational phase-field modeling of fracture, first proposed in 2000 for brittle fracture of homogeneous and isotropic materials in predominant mode I, has since been further developed in several directions, encompassing the extension to multiaxial stress states, to heterogeneous and anisotropic materials, to ductile, dynamic and rate-dependent fracture. While the first model was based on the regularization of a variational reformulation of Griffith’s fracture criterion, for many of the subsequent extensions the structural rigidity of the variational framework led to the proliferation of non-variational models, which give up the theoretical and practical advantages of the variational framework in exchange for a greater flexibility to reproduce experimental results.

In this presentation, we discuss some ideas by which variational phase-field models can be endowed with sufficient flexibility to overcome the limitations of existing models, possibly leading to a second generation of variational phase-field fracture models. We show some first results in this direction concerning fracture under multiaxial stress states, fracture of anisotropic materials, and dynamic fracture.

Biosketch: Laura De Lorenzis received her Engineering degree and her PhD from the University of her hometown Lecce, in southern Italy, where she first stayed as Assistant and later as Associate Professor of Solid and structural mechanics. In 2013 she moved to the TU Braunschweig, Germany, as Professor and Director of the Institute of Applied Mechanics. There she was founding member and first Chair (2017-2020) of the Center for Mechanics, Uncertainty and Simulation in Engineering. Since 2020 she is Professor of Computational Mechanics at ETH Zürich, in the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering. She was visiting scholar in several renowned institutions, including Chalmers University of Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (as holder of a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006), the Leibniz University of Hannover (with an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 2010-2011), the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Cape Town.

She is the recipient of several prizes, including the RILEM L’Hermite Medal 2011, the AIMETA Junior Prize 2011, the IIFC Young Investigator Award 2012, the Euromech Solid Mechanics Fellowship 2022, the IACM Fellowship 2024, two best paper awards and two student teaching prizes. In 2011 she was awarded a European Research Council Starting Researcher Grant. She has authored or co-authored more than 150 papers on international journals on different topics of computational and applied mechanics. Since 2023 she is Editor of Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering.