Prof. Dr. Paul Steinmann awarded second ERC Advanced Grant: 2.5 million euros of funding for five years
Prof. Dr. Paul Steinmann, IRTG PI in Project B, has been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Professor Steinmann intends to use the funding worth 2.5 million euros to investigate the fracture mechanics of soft materials such as rubber or tissue more intensively during the next five years. Steinmann received his first ERC Advanced Grant for research into magnetic elastomers in 2011.
Paul Steinmann is a leading expert in modeling and simulating the behavior of materials. n his research project, which Steinmann has named “SoftFrac”, he intends to test new modeling approaches and algorithms that allow the spread of cracks in soft materials to be tracked numerically. Steinmann plans to use experiments to generate comprehensive data about fracture behavior, supported by a high-speed camera that supplies several tens of thousands of images per second. A large proportion of the grant will be used to set up several new positions for staff. “This increased team power will enable us to go way beyond previous investigations and work on completely new problems for the first time,” explains Steinmann. “I am convinced that SoftFrac will herald a new era in the comprehensive research of the fracture mechanics of soft materials.”
In addition to his responsibilities at the Chair of Applied Mechanics at FAU, Steinmann is director of the Glasgow Computational Engineering Centre (GCEC) in the UK. He is also the speaker of the DFG research training group “Fracture across scales: integrating mechanics, materials science, mathematics, chemistry, and physics (FRASCAL)”. He has been the Officer for Strategic Development at FAU since December 2020. Paul Steinmann has received several awards for his outstanding research, such as Fellow Awards from IACM and EUROMECH (2006), the Timoshenko Visiting Scholar Award from Stanford University (2007), an ERC Advanced Grant (2011) and the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2017).
Source: Website entry on the website of the Technische Fakultät