UNSW RIIS student Sana Shahoveisi was awarded the prestigious Steven Prize for the best paper at the 6^th Australasian Conference of Computational Mechanics (ACCM-2023). ACCM provides an international platform for the exchange and dissemination of recent findings on a diverse range of advanced topics within Computational Mechanics. The 6th ACCM took place in Melbourne, Australia, in December 2023.

Sana delivered a presentation on her computational framework addressing the critical issues of modelling flaws and defect propagation, with a specific emphasis on fracturing in porous media. The paper titled “Hydro-Mechanical Fully Coupled Phase-Field Modelling of Fracture in Porous Media” provides a comprehensive study for simulating dynamic fractures. The focus is on addressing the challenges associated with crack width estimation in this context. The model is able to capture dynamic crack propagation by incorporating the kinetic energy in the coupled hydro-mechanical-damage equations. This research contributes to advancing our understanding of fractures in porous media through a comprehensive and innovative approach. 

This research has been conducted under the supervision of Lead CI Professor Nasser Khalili, CI Babak Shahbodagh, CI Mohammad Vahab, and Dr Sascha Eisenträger