Nicolas Moës is awarded an ERC Synergy Grant for his X-MESH project

The ERC Synergy Grant 2022 call for proposals represents an overall budget of €295 million for the 29 proposals selected from the 360 submitted.

This funding - of up to €10 million for a period of 6 years - is intended to help groups of two to four outstanding researchers bring together complementary skills, knowledge and resources in one ambitious project.

The 29 winning projects involve 105 principal investigators who will carry out their research at universities and research centres in 19 countries across Europe and beyond

 

X-MESH among the selected proposals

The X-MESH project is led by Nicolas Moës, professor at Centrale Nantes, and Jean-François Remacle of the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). Working closely with Nicolas Moës in Nantes on the project are Nicolas Chevaugeon and Benoit Le, both also of the GeM Insititute.

X-MESH is an innovative approach that aims to overcome a major difficulty associated with engineering analysis: by providing a revolutionary way to track physical interfaces in finite element simulations using extreme deformation of the meshes.

The key idea is to allow elements to deform up to zero measure. For example, a triangle can deform to an edge or even a point. This idea is rather extreme and totally revisits the interaction between the meshing community and the computational community, who, for decades have striven to interact through beautiful meshes.

Six areas in fluid and solid mechanics as well as heat transfer are targeted. Interfaces will be either material, i.e., attached to particles of matter (the interface between two immiscible fluids or the dry interface in a wetting and drying model) or immaterial, i.e. migrating through the material (solidification front, contact front, yield front or crack front).

Advances are expected from this X-MESH method in the following engineering fields: safety design and maintenance, manufacturing processes, coastal engineering, energy efficiency, ocean modeling, to name but a few.

► Learn more about the project
 

Nicolas Moës

Nicolas Moës is a member of both the Institut Universitaire de France and the Académie des Sciences. He was awarded the CNRS silver medal in 2014 and the ONERA prize in 2019. He was already awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2012 and a Proof of Concept in 2017. His main research interests are damage, breakage, contact, extended finite elements (X-FEM).