This Colloquium will provide a forum to present and debate several advanced computational, experimental, and analytical methods for studying the behavior of complex materials and structures. The goal is to gather researchers (engineers, physicists, mathematicians) specialized in multiscale material modelling for simulating the mechanics of solids and the physics of matter with the final aim of bridging the gap between Solids and Structural Mechanics and Material Science in the modelling of 'complex' materials. Both computational and experimental aspects will play a central role, but talks can focus on a broad range of aspects either related to the material modelling or the structural one.

Various types of complex materials, made of very different constituents, are used nowadays in engineering practice: particle or fibrous composites; laminates; green composites with natural fillers and industrial or urban recyclable materials; nanomaterials; architecture material; in general complex multiphase materials with a complex internal structure including: porosity, reinforcement in the form of short fibres and particles of various properties, shapes and sizes, filled in different media. It is widely recognized that important macroscopic properties such as the macroscopic stiffness and strength are governed by multiphysics processes (e.g. damage due to heat transfer or fluid penetration, crack propagation under thermal shock in ceramic/metallic matrix composites, etc.) which occur at one to several scales below the level of observation. A thorough understanding of how these processes influence the reduction of stiffness and strength, is a key to the analysis of existing, and the design of improved, complex materials. The Colloquium will be centered on “Multiscale and Multiphysics Modeling of Complex Materials”, with attention to the constitutive aspects concerning complex materials, so defined for the presence of internal structure at different scales (nano/micro/meso) and non-linear constitutive behavior (plasticity, damage, fracture, etc.). Particular interest will concern the modelling of non-classical/non-local continuous models, which keep memory of the internal structure and whose field equations contain lengths of internal scale which allow avoiding, in numerical solutions, problems of convergence and dependence on the adopted discretizations. In this framework, the interest and suitability of multiscale strategies bridging different material scales will be highlighted, as well as engineering applications. The focus will be set on computational issues, while still highlighting the underlying conceptual and theoretical basis.