Sergio R. Idelsohn

Centre Internacional de Mètodes Numèrics en l'Enginyeria (CIMNE)

Engineering Sciences

Date and place of birth: November 15, 1947, Paraná (Argentina). Marital status: Married. Three children. Education: Degree: Mechanical Engineer, Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina) 1970. Postgraduate Studies: PhD in Applied Sciences, University of Liege (Belgium) 1974. Adviser: Prof. Fraeijs de Veubeke. Languages: Spanish, French and English. Research Interests: Computational Mechanics, Finite Element Methods in Structural Dynamics, Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer. Present Positions: ICREA Research Professor and Senior Researcher at the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. Full-time Professor, National University of Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina (in leave of absence).


Research interests

He is a specialist in the numerical simulations of mechanical engineering problems, in particular, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). In the last ten years he developed a new method called the Particle Finite Element Method (PFEM) to solve fluid mechanics problems including free-surface flow, breaking waves and fragmentation. This method becomes very popular to solve problems like ship and harbour designs, melting of metals, erosion, and polymer combustion or magma analysis. Currently he works on solving CFD problems in Real Time using approximation techniques based on particles.

Selected publications

– Costarelli SD, Garelli L, Cruchaga GA, Storti MA, Ausensi R & Idelsohn SR 2016, ‘An Embedded Strategy for the Analysis of Fluid Structure Interaction Problems: Numerical Implementation on GPU Hardware and Experimental Validation’, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., Vol. 300, pp:106–128.

– Becker PA & Idelsohn SR 2016, ‘A multiresolution strategy for solving landslides using the Particle Finite Element Method’, Acta Geotechnica, 11, 3, 643 – 657.

– Limache A & Idelsohn S 2016, ‘On the issue that finite element discretizations violate, nodally, Clausius postulate of the second law of thermodynamics’, Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences, 3:13.

– Cosimo A, Cardona A & Idelsohn S 2016, ‘General Treatment of Essential Boundary Conditions in Reduced Order Models for Non-Linear Problems’,
 Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences, 3:7.

– Gimenez JM, Nigro NM, Idelsohn SR & Oñate E 2016, ‘Surface tension problems solved with the Particle Finite Element Method using large time-steps’, Computers & Fluids, Volume 141, pp 90–104.

– Gimenez JM, Morin P, Nigro N & Idelsohn S 2016, ‘Numerical Comparison of the Particle Finite Element Method Against an Eulerian Formulation’, In Advances in Computational Fluid-Structure Interaction and Flow Simulation; pp 7-24. Part of the series Modeling and Simulation in Science, Engineering and Technology; Springer.


Selected research activities

– Plenary Lecturer at the World Congress on Computational Mechanics -WCCM-/ Seoul, Korea, July 2016

– Keynote Lecturer at the VII European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering ECCOMAS, Greece, June 2016

– Plenary Lecturer at the Congress New Challenges in Computational Mechanics / Cachan, Paris, May 2016

– Awardee by the International Association of Computational Mechanics with the “IACM Computational Mechanics Award”, Seoul, Korea, 2016.

– Elected Vice President of the International Association of Computational Mechanics-IACM- for the period 2014-2018.