Fluid-Structure Interaction of Elastic Shells for Aerospace and Biomedical Applications
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abstract
Shells are light-weight structures made of shell elements, typically curved, and assembled to form large structures such as aircraft fuselage, spacecraft, rockets, cars, and storage tanks. Shell structures also appear in the form of membranes in many biological systems such as arteries, the pulmonary passage and veins. In these applications, the structures have a thickness small compared to the other dimensions and are referred as thin-shells. In addition, they undergo large displacements and must be analysed using nonlinear elasticity. Secondly, because the shells are subjected to an external loading in the form of a fluid flow (i.e. air for aerospace applications and blood for medical applications), it is necessary, yet not trivial to account for the interaction of the fluid on the structure to fully describe the dynamic behaviour of the shells. This program of research will built on existing theoretical models and will improve the treatment of nonlinear vibrations and dynamic stability of shells by i) allowing higher-order shear deformation, rotary inertia and thickness variation and, (ii) by including hyperelasticity and viscoelasticity as material nonlinearities. In particular, we will focus on two problems: i) the development of an energy-efficient, safe shell-element made of advanced materials (composite, sandwich and/or functionally graded materials FGM) for aerospace, and oil and gas industries and ii) the study of a biomechanics problem known as aortic dissection in which a tear in the inner wall of the aorta causes blood to flow resulting in a catastrophic failure.........
