New open-access Publication in Computational Mechanics

We are happy to announce the publication of the article "A Consistent Mixed-Dimensional Coupling Approach for 1D Cosserat Beams and 2D Surfaces in 3D Space" as an open-access paper in the journal Computational Mechanics.

In this paper, we investigate the mixed-dimensional coupling of 1D beams and 2D surfaces.In practice, the 2D surfaces can represent either the boundary of a 3D solid volume or the midsurface of a structural shell model.

Particular challenges arise in the general case where the beam is offset relative to the surface in the surface normal direction. We show that only a consistent treatment of the coupling conditions, i.e., one that explicitly includes the surface normal vector in the coupling equations, leads to a formulation that satisfies fundamental mechanical principles such as the conservation of angular momentum. These findings are not limited to mixed-dimensional problems but can also be directly applied to classical surface-to-surface coupling scenarios, as they occur, for example, in domain decomposition approaches applied to solid mechanics.

Steinbrecher, I., Hagmeyer, N., Meier, C., & Popp, A. (2025). A consistent mixed-dimensional coupling approach for 1D Cosserat beams and 2D surfaces in 3D space. Computational Mechanics, 76(5), 1233–1260. DOI (Open Access)