Polytechnic University of Catalonia

About: Polytechnic University of Catalonia is a education organization based out in Barcelona, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Finite element method & Population. The organization has 16006 authors who have published 45325 publications receiving 949306 citations. The organization is also known as: UPC - BarcelonaTECH & Technical University of Catalonia.

Modelling strong discontinuities in solid mechanics via strain softening constitutive equations. part 1: fundamentals

Abstract: The paper addresses some fundamental aspects about the use of standard constitutive equations to model strong discontinuities (cracks, shear bands, slip lines, etc.) in solid mechanics analyzes. The strong discontinuity analysis is introduced as a basic tool to derive a general framework, in which different families of constitutive equations can be considered, that allows to extract some outstanding aspects of the intended analysis. In particular, a link between continuum and discrete approaches to the strain localization phenomena is obtained. Applications to standard continuum damage and elastoplastic constitutive equations are presented. Relevant aspects to be considered in the numerical simulation of the problem (tackled in Part 2 of the work) are also presented.

Word sense disambiguation using Conceptual Density

Abstract: This paper present a method for the resolution of lexical ambiguity of nouns and its automatic evaluation over the Brown Corpus The method relies on the use of the wide-coverage noun taxonomy of WordNet and the notion of conceptual distance among concepts, captured by a Conceptual Density formula developed for this purpose This fully automatic method requires no hand coding of lexical entries, hand tagging of text nor any kind of training process The results of the experiments have been automatically evaluted against SemCor, the sense-tagged version of the Brown Corpus

A consistent characteristic length for smeared cracking models

Abstract: A numerical scheme for crack modelling by means of continuous displacement fields is presented. In two-dimensional problems a crack is modelled as a limiting case of two singular lines (with continuous displacements, but discontinuous displacement gradients across them) which tend to coincide with each other. An analysis of the energy dissipated inside the band bounded by both lines allows one to obtain an expression for the characteristic length as the ratio between the energy dissipated per unit surface area (fracture energy) and the energy dissipated per unit volume (specific energy) at a point. The application of these mathematical expressions to the finite element discretized medium allow one to obtain a general spatial and directional expression for the characteristic length which guarantees the objectivity of the results with respect to the size of the finite element mesh. The numerical results presented show the reliability of the proposed expressions.