Ecole Centrale de Nantes, France
Nicolas MOËS is full professor at the Ecole Centrale de Nantes (France) since 2001. He received his engineering degree 
from the University of Liège and his PhD from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan under the guidance of Pierre Ladevèze.
He is one of the co-inventor of the eXtended Finite Element Method (X-FEM).
This work was initiated during his post-doctoral stay at Northwestern University in the team of Ted Belytschko (following another post-doc with professor Tinsley Oden at UT Austin).
More recently, he has been developing with colleagues at Nantes a new model lying between fracture and damage mechanics coined the thick level set approach (TLS) as well as a new approach to solve contact formulations (and other variational inequalities as the Bingham fluid formulation). This work was funded by an advanced ERC grant.
He received the young investigator award from the IACM (International Association for Computational Mechanics) in 2006 and was declared IACM fellow in 2008. In 2014, he received the silver medal from CNRS.
Combining continuous and discontinuous approaches to fracture with a geometrical description of dissipation : The Thick Level Set approach
Continuous and discontinuous approaches to fracture have both their advantages and drawbacks. On one side, the discontinuous approach, Griffith type or cohesive, allows for a clear separation of matter but was not designed to take into account easily triaxiality effects close to the crack faces, as well as complicate crack patterns (merging and branching).
On the other side, continuous approaches allows one to use the full blown capabilities of bulk constitutive models but face tremendous computational cost especially when process zone sizes are important. Continuous model are also not well suited if crack opening informations need to be accessed (for instance for a coupling with fluid flow).
The Thick Level Set approach (TLS) to fracture reconciles both approaches and make them usable both at the same time. The key idea is that bulk and interfacial damage are being given a related geometrical meaning (configurational type). Both models may thus combined to create a new powerful material modeling frame.