Abstract
Contact between soft solids plays a crucial role in biological systems, especially during growth and morphogenesis, where evolving geometries lead to complex interactions. Modeling these systems with the finite-element method is particularly challenging, as contact must be resolved alongside other coupled physical processes, all within geometries that evolve over time. In this talk, I will present an Eulerian finite-element framework designed to handle mechanical contact in systems with evolving geometries. The method combines a fixed computational grid with a phase-field description of solids and uses the reference map technique to capture elasticity. Contact is enforced through a volumetric penalty constraint that robustly prevents interpenetration. While our current focus is on solid-solid contact, the framework is naturally suited for scenarios involving growth, remodeling, and active material behavior. By combining geometric flexibility with numerical robustness, this approach offers promising capabilities for simulating contact in complex, dynamic systems, such as biofilm morphogenesis in porous media.
Bio
David Kammer is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Building Materials. He earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Civil Engineering from EPFL and completed his PhD in Mechanics there in 2014. He held research positions at the Bern University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel before joining Cornell University (USA) as an assistant professor in 2016. In 2019, he moved to ETH Zurich. His research focuses on failure mechanics applied to a range of problems across many length scales. In 2022, he received a prestigious SNSF starting grant to explore meta-interfaces.