Ricardo Daniel Pereira Costa is the author of the thesis “Advanced computational methods towards high-performance polymer processing simulations”, co-supervised by João Miguel de Amorim Novais Costa Nóbrega and Stéphane Louis Clain, which has just won the best PhD Thesis in Applied and Computational Mechanics 2020 award by APMTAC – Portuguese Association of Theoretical, Applied and Computational Mechanics, ex aequo with the thesis of another candidate, Carolina Furtado Pereira da Silva.
The winner will receive, in September 2022, the Best Thesis in Applied and Computational Mechanics 2020 Award Certificate, in a public ceremony, during the CMN 2022- “Congress on Numerical Methods in Engineering”, to be held in Las Palmas, Spain, with which APMTAC is associated.
The prize consists of 1000 euros for participation in congresses or conferences of APMTAC, ECCOMAS (European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences) or IACM (International Association for Computational Mechanics).
Ricardo Costa’s PhD thesis reflected on the fact that the application of computational modelling tools in engineering is seeing exponential growth in recent decades, strongly driven by the development of increasingly powerful computational resources. In polymer processing, the computational approach aims to help understand the complex, and often counterintuitive, behaviour of polymeric materials, assuming a crucial role in the development of more efficient and sustainable manufacturing technologies, with lower consumption of material and energy resources.
However, the high complexity of these processes and of the materials used requires long computation times, which are prohibitive in an industrial context and which often condition the use of these approaches. The research work carried out aimed to develop advanced computational methods for polymer processing, enabling these tools with precision and efficiency significantly higher than the conventional methods currently used.
This innovative approach allows to reproduce in just a few hours the same results that conventional methods would take several weeks to calculate, being a very significant advance for computational modelling and its application in an industrial context.
Already in 2019, this research work by the School of Engineering student had been awarded the Polymer Processing Society Graduate Travel Award 2019 during the Polymer Processing Society International Conference, held in Çeşce, Turkey, from 26 to 30 May 2019. This award aimed to encourage young researchers to develop relevant and excellent research in the area of polymer processing.
The School of Engineering congratulates Ricardo Costa for the awards achieved for his research work.
