We welcome our new group member Lukas Laubert!
We are very happy to congratulate Lukas Laubert on receiving his master degree and to warmly welcome him as our new group member. His master thesis on “Mechanical Analysis of Bio-Sourced Epoxy: Study of Elastic, Viscous, and Plastic Properties” forms a highly important contribution for the scientific activities of the Capriccio group and lays the foundations for Lukas’ succeeding doctoral research project, which is part of the Franco-German project “BIO ART”. In his master thesis, Lukas did a literature review on available continuum mechanical material models capable to reproduce the thermo-mechanical behaviour of highly inelastic thermosetting polymers as synthesised from biological resources by our French colleagues. Furthermore, he specified a numerical representation of the experimental testing set-up used by our collaborators at the Institut de Chimie et des Matériaux Paris-Est (ICMPE) at Thiais. In this course, Lukas revisited, among others, the foundations of Bernoulli’s beam theory, of elastic, viscous, and plastic material modelling, of experimental dynamic mechanical thermal analysis (DMTA) and time-temperature superposition as well as various important aspects in the context of applying the Finite Element method for parameter identifications of constitutive laws. To this end, he has been in close interaction with the colleagues at ICMPE, but also with the developers of a highly promising hyperelastic finite-strain viscoelastic-viscoplastic material model at the Université de Liège in Belgium. Eventually, Lukas successfully demonstrated the capabilities of the chosen material model and gave a comprehensive overview of aspects requiring careful attention in his further studies.
We wish Lukas a good start in the Capriccio group and a successful doctoral project!
