Ravindra Duddu

Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Civil and Environmental Engineering
Mechanical Engineering

Intellectual Neighborhoods

Research Focus

Computational Solid Mechanics, Multi-scale and Multi-physics Fracture Mechanics, Constitutive Modeling, Cohesive Zone Modeling of Fatigue Delamination, Extended Finite Element Method and Level Set Method, Computational Geophysics.

In general, the focus is on: (1) developing advanced physics based models for materials and material phenomena; (2) formulating robust and accurate numerical methodologies; and (3) implementing efficient algorithms for parallel computing. Current in-house codes are implemented using C++, FORTRAN and MATLAB with MPI for parallel platforms and in commercial finite element software, mainly, ABAQUS.

Research Areas

Multi-physics damage modeling of fracture:

Quasi-brittle materials such as porous ceramics, natural polycrystalline ice, rock, composites and concrete etc., are ubiquitous as natural and man-made structural materials with several applications. In addition, fracture in such materials is made complicated by several governing mechanical and chemical processes of creep, fatigue, corrosion, and oxidation, which are dependent on the ambient temperature. Our research objective is to develop a multi-scale and multi-physics nonlocal damage mechanics formulations for investigating the thermo-mechanical behavior of quasi-brittle materials, particularly, porous ceramics and natural polycrystalline ice. This research is important order to understand the fracture mechanisms leading to fracture of ice sheets in relation to global warming and to improve the lifetime and performance of porous ceramics.

Microstructure evolution in high-performance structural alloys:

High-performance alloys or super-alloys exhibit superior mechanical strength and are creep and corrosion resistant at high temperatures. Therefore, they are commonly used a structural materials in aerospace, automotive, and turbine industry. Our research objective is to develop novel computational methodologies for simulating morphology evolution of super-alloy microstructures during fabrication and processing and shed light onto the underlying physical mechanisms that drive second-phase particle evolution. This research is important to understanding the process-microstructure-property relationships of materials, which can lead to new technological innovations for manufacturing advanced materials and for improving energy efficiency.

Biography

Dr. Ravindra Duddu joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University in the fall of 2012. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University in the City of New York (2010-2012) and a postdoctoral fellow at University of Texas at Austin (2009-2010).

Dr. Duddu is member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), United States Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), American Geophysical Union (AGU).

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