Guest Lecture by Prof. Rui Micaelo

Prof. Rui Micaelo holds a PhD and "Licenciatura" in Civil Engineering from the University of Porto (Portugal). He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering of the NOVA School of Science and Technology | FCT NOVA, and a member of the research unit CERIS NOVA, a branch at FCT NOVA of CERIS - Civil Engineering Research and Innovation for Sustainability (IST-ID research unit, classification "Excellent").

His research is devoted to the study of road and runway paving techniques to obtain longer-lasting, resilient and sustainable transport infrastructures. His R&D activities have been mostly concentrated on asphalt materials, namely with the physical, rheological and mechanical characterization, the micromechanical modelling using the Discrete Element Method (DEM), and more recently with the development of the asphalt self-healing technique with encapsulated rejuvenators. In the PhD work, he investigated for the first time the field asphalt compaction process with a particle-based DEM model (awarded with the best paper award in the Mairepav 6 conference-2009). These activities have been developed in close collaboration with national and international research centres.

He was a visiting researcher at the University of Nottingham (UK) (Sept-2015 to Aug-2016), and at the Polytechnique University of Barcelona (Spain) (Jan/Mar-2019). In the last 10-years, he has authored and co-authored 29 papers in international journals and 17 papers in international conferences (SCOPUS h-15, 996 citations). He is a member of the Editorial Board of three international journals: Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050); Infrastructures (ISSN: 2412-3811); Standards (ISSN 2305-6703). He supervised/co-supervised 1 PhD student and 38 MSc Students. He was the coordinator of the Portuguese participation in a European research project (Interreg SUDOE program).

The topic of her presentation was “VirtualPM3DLab – Virtual 3D Particle Model Laboratory”

Abstract:

VirtualPM3DLab is a software tool, programmed in C++, currently under development within a discrete element model framework. Its purpose is to simulate the physical and mechanical behavior of composite materials, with a particular focus on bituminous mixtures. This lecture outlines the objectives of the tool, its overall structure, the key developments achieved so far, and the planned future enhancements.

We thank Prof. Micaelo and all the participants!