We congratulate Luigi Greco for his PhD

Luigi Greco, who is associated with our institute as a guest researcher, successfully defended his doctoral thesis on 3 April 2025. We congratulate him warmly!

The title of his thesis is ‘Isogeometric methods for the study of fracture mechanics via phase-field modelling’. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Alessandro Reali, Dr. Alessia Patton and Prof. Matteo Negri. His opponents were Prof. Josef Kiendl and Prof. Guillermo Lorenzo Gomez.

The PhD thesis is focused on the study of fracture propagation through Phase-Field modeling carried out via Isogeometric Analysis. The main goal of the work lies in reducing the computational cost of the studied problem by employing high-order damage models. In the first step of the work, the high-order phase-field model from literature was studied, and a quantitative evaluation was conducted to assess its computational advantage compared to classical low-order models. Subsequently, a new model was proposed, which was shown to be well-posed from both a mathematical and engineering perspective. Finally, the study was extended to the field of dynamics to explore the advantages within this framework.

You can find the thesis open-access here.

Futher open-access publications by Luigi Greco regarding this topic are:

Luigi Greco, Alessia Patton, Matteo Negri, Alessandro Marengo, Umberto Perego, Alessandro Reali (2024).
Higher order phase-field modeling of brittle fracture via isogeometric analysis. Engineering with Computers. [Paper]

Luigi Greco, Eleonora Maggiorelli, Matteo Negri, Alessia Patton, Alessandro Reali (2025).
AT1 fourth-order isogeometric phase-field modeling of brittle fracture.[Paper]

_{Picture: Copyright © 2025, Luigi Greco}