The Modeling and Simulation research group at the Mechanical Engineering department of the ETSI Industriales is devoted to the design, analysis and implementation of numerical methods for the simulation of complex problems in solid and fluid mechanics.
Recent Posts
Invited talk at the STAMS 2026 Colloquium
Ignacio Romero gave an invited talk entitled Thermal and mechanical solids with embedded structures: models and approximations at the SEMTA-GAMM Colloquium STAMS 2026, held in Cuenca, Spain, October 2026.
Information on PhD positions
Regarding the previous post on a fully funded PhD position in the computational modelling of materials with embedded fibers and inclusions, we would like to inform you the regional government has just announced the call for research scholarships, which is available online at:
https://www.bocm.es/boletin/CM_Orden_BOCM/2026/09/29/BOCM-20260929-20.PDF
As announced, the group has been assigned two of these scholarships and all interested candidates will need to apply. Our university has set in place the rule for applications in this page:
Open PhD position
Fully Funded PhD Opportunity in AI for Future Railway Systems
We are seeking highly motivated candidates for a fully funded PhD position within the project"Intelligent Systems for Advanced Railway Traffic Management with Virtual Coupling" at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). The research will focus on developing innovative artificial intelligence, optimization, and advanced control techniques to enable the next generation of railway traffic management systems.
The successful candidate will work on topics including AI and machine learning for railway applications, virtual coupling, multi-agent control systems, digital twins, simulation environments, and intelligent decision-support tools for railway operations.
Talk at ICMM9 conference in Prague
Ahsan Kaleem gave a talk entitled A Monolithic Mixed Finite Element Formulation for Thermomechanical Small-strain Elastoplasticity with Temperature-dependent Properties at the 9th International Conference on Material Modeling (ICMM9), held at the Czech Technical University in Prague, September 1-3, 2026. Co-author: I. Romero.
New article: A correction method for crack area overestimation in phase-field fracture
New article: Castillón, M., Segurado, J. and Romero, I. (2026). A correction method for crack area overestimation in phase-field fracture, Computational Mechanics. (link).
Phase-field fracture models systematically overestimate the crack area, a consequence of the diffuse crack representation and of numerical artifacts such as strain localization, where the phase-field variable saturates artificially across finite elements. In this article we propose a correction framework built on the principle of energy equipartition: as the length-scale parameter vanishes, the contributions of the phase field and of its gradient to the fracture energy become equal. Since the numerical artifacts affect mainly the phase-field term while leaving the gradient term largely unperturbed, the crack area can be approximated as twice the gradient-dependent energy. The resulting estimate is mesh-independent, applies to the whole domain, and extends naturally to three dimensions. The method is validated against benchmarks with analytical solutions, compared with skeletonization algorithms, and applied to complex geometries with curvilinear crack paths and to a three-dimensional simulation.
COMMET project selected for funding
The project accelerated COmputational Micro-mechanics through Mixed-dimensionality Embedding Techniques (COMMET) has been selected for funding by the Spanish Research Agency. COMMET will develop mixed-dimensional embedding techniques to accelerate the computational micromechanics of heterogeneous materials.
Minisymposium on the lattice Boltzmann method at WCCM-ECCOMAS 2026
Ignacio Romero and Ferdinando Auricchio organized the minisymposium The lattice Boltzmann method as a general-purpose tool in computational mechanics at the 17th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM-ECCOMAS 2026), held in Munich, Germany, 19-24 July 2026.
Symposium organized at WCCM-ECCOMAS 2026
Christina Schenk and Ignacio Romero organized the symposium MS199 - Learning from Data: Bayesian Methods for Safer and Smarter Computational Modeling in Science and Engineering at the 17th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM-ECCOMAS 2026), held in Munich, Germany, 19-24 July 2026.