Reddy, Junuthula Distinguished Professor and O'Donnell Foundation Chair IV

The current research of Dr. Reddy and his group deals with refined shell theories and associated robust shell finite elements which are free of all types of locking, and nonlocal beam and plate theories using the ideas of Eringen, Mindlin, Koiter, and others (in collaboration with colleagues from China, Finland, France, India, Singapore, Spain). He and his group has developed a thermodynamically based strain gradient elasticity theory that contains Mindlin's model as a special case. They also conceived a transformative non-parametric network based methodology to study damage and fracture in solids (GraFEA), which yields mesh independent results for fracture and its propagation and it does not require user input about the possible fracture initiation and propagation. His works on nonlocal mechanics ideas and their incorporation into structural theories to predict the bending, buckling, and vibration response (the main idea is to embed micropolarity, which brings an additional layer of kinematics through the micro-rotation degrees of freedom within a continuum model to account for the microstructural effects during deformation to study architected materials and structures) and graph-based finite elements to predict damage and fracture are receiving attention of fellow researchers around the world. His shear deformation plate and shell theories and their finite element models and the penalty finite element models of non-Newtonian fluids have been implemented into commercial finite element computer programs like ABAQUS, NISA, and HyperXtrude.