We congratulate Diego Ignesti on his PhD

25 May 2026

Diego Ignesti, who is closely connected to our institute through his several-month stay as a visiting researcher and his role as an external doctoral candidate, successfully defended his doctoral thesis on May 22, 2026. We congratulate him most sincerely!

The title of his PhD thesis is

“A novel isogeometric collocation formulation for geometrically exact finite-strains beams with material nonlinearities”

The thesis was supervised by Prof. Enzo Marino (University of Florence), Prof. Josef Kiendl (Bundeswehr University Munich), Prof. Ferdinando Auricchio (University of Pavia), and Prof. Alessandro Reali (University of Pavia) acted as supervisors for this PhD thesis

The Ph.D. thesis develops a novel isogeometric collocation formulation for geometrically exact beams at finite strains, incorporating nonlinear three-dimensional constitutive models. The first contribution addresses a gap in the literature concerning the modelling and analysis of arbitrarily curved beams, including cases of vanishing curvature. Building on this, the main goal of the thesis is to provide a powerful and efficient framework for simulating complex beam structures undergoing large displacements and rotations, as well as finite strains and time- and temperature-dependent material effects. The method proposed allows retrieving the cross-sectional deformation without any modification on the beam kinematics, as well as accounting for the three-dimensional effect in the beam governing equations. The proposed methodology bridges the gap between computationally expensive continuum simulations and overly simplified one-dimensional beam models, offering a flexible platform for a wide range of engineering applications.

Further open-access publications by Diego Ignesti on this topic are:

• Ignesti, G. Ferri, F. Auricchio, A. Reali, E. Marino, "An improved isogeometric collocation formulation for spatial multi-patch shear-deformable beams with arbitrary initial curvature", Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Volume 403, Part A, 2023, 115722, ISSN 0045-7825,
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2022.115722.
• Ferri, D. Ignesti, E. Marino, An efficient displacement-based isogeometric formulation for geometrically exact viscoelastic beams, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Volume 417, Part A, 2023, 116413, ISSN 0045-7825,
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2023.116413.
• Ignesti, G. Ferri, A. Reali, F. Auricchio, J. Kiendl, E. Marino, A novel finite-strain mixed isogeometric collocation formulation for hyperelastic geometrically exact beams, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Volume 450, 2026, 118641, ISSN 0045-7825,
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2025.118641
• Ignesti, G. Ferri, E. Marino, An isogeometric collocation formulation for finite-strain visco-hyperelastic geometrically exact beams, Meccanica 61, 77 (2026).
  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11012-026-02123-5