Tod A. Laursen
Adjunct Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science
Tod Laursen received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1992. His earlier degrees were an M.S. from Stanford in 1989 and a B.S. from Oregon State University in 1986. Before joining the Duke faculty in 1992, Dr. Laursen worked as a solid mechanics analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1986 to 1992. He had obtained previous structural analysis experience while working for Boeing in 1985.
At Duke, Dr. Laursen teaches undergraduate courses in engineering computing and engineering science and teaches graduate courses in continuum mechanics, engineering analysis, finite element methods, and the use of finite element methods for the solution of nonlinear problems. His research activities fall largely under these same categories, with a special interest in the modeling of physical systems exhibiting contact and friction phenomena in the presence of large deformations, inelasticity, and other sources of nonlinearity. Applications for this work are to be found in such diverse settings as crashworthiness evaluation for automobiles, wear characterization, metal forming applications, and the geophysical description of slip propagation in fault zones.
Dr. Laursen's published work appears in such journals as the Journal of Applied Mechanics, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Journal of Materials Research, International Journal of Solids and Structures, Computers and Structures, and Communications in Numerical Methods in Engineering.
Appointments and Affiliations
- Adjunct Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science
Contact Information
- Office Location: 144 Hudson Hall, Durham, NC 27708
- Office Phone: (919) 660-5310
- Email Address: [email protected]
Education
- Ph.D. Stanford University, 1992
- M.S. Stanford University, 1989
- B.S. Oregon State University, 1986
Research Interests
Engineering computing and engineering science, continuum mechanics, engineering analysis, finite element methods, and the use of finite element methods for the solution of nonlinear problems, with a special interest in the modeling of physical systems exhibiting contact and friction phenomena in the presence of large deformations, inelasticity, and other sources of nonlinearity.
Representative Publications
- Kindo, TM; Laursen, TA; Dolbow, JE, Toward robust and accurate contact solvers for large deformation applications: A remapping/adaptivity framework for mortar-based methods, Computational Mechanics, vol 54 no. 1 (2014), pp. 53-70 [10.1007/s00466-014-1013-5] [abs].
- Kindo, TM; Laursen, TA; Dolbow, JE, Toward robust and accurate contact solvers for large deformation applications: a remapping/adaptivity framework for mortar-based methods, Computational Mechanics (2014) [abs].
- Laursen, TA; Puso, MA; Sanders, J, Mortar contact formulations for deformable-deformable contact: Past contributions and new extensions for enriched and embedded interface formulations, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, vol 205-208 no. 1 (2012), pp. 3-15 [10.1016/j.cma.2010.09.006] [abs].
- Bravo, R; Pérez-Aparicio, JL; Laursen, TA, An energy consistent frictional dissipating algorithm for particle contact problems, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, vol 92 no. 9 (2012), pp. 753-781 [10.1002/nme.4346] [abs].
- Sanders, JD; Laursen, TA; Puso, MA, A Nitsche embedded mesh method, Computational Mechanics, vol 49 no. 2 (2012), pp. 243-257 [10.1007/s00466-011-0641-2] [abs].