Juan José Ródenas

Instituto de Ingeniería Mecánica y Biomecánica (I2MB) – Universitat Politècnica de València
Full address: Camino de Vera s/n Edificio 9C. 46022-Valencia (Spain)
E-mail: jjrodena@mcm.upv.es

In Jan-1993, I obtained a Degree in Industrial Engineering (Specialist in Mechanics) from the Polytechnical University of Valencia (UPV). I took 2 of the 6 courses of my degree in UK, the 4th at Coventry Polytechnic and the 6th at Cranfield Institute of Technology, where I obtained an MSc in Design of Rotating Machines, Jul-93, that led to 2 awards, one granted by British Aerospace.

My research and teaching career began in Nov-1993 when I became a full-time member of the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering (UPV).

My PhD thesis, “Discretization error in the calculation of sensitivities using the finite element method (FEM)”, marked my research career that has evolved (following the common thread of precision modelling through adaptive refinement in the FEM) through: a) Improvement of the MEF solution through recovery techniques, b) Error estimation and bounding in energy norm and quantities of interest using recovery-type estimators, c) Structural shape optimization, d) High-efficiency MEF analysis with geometry-independent Cartesian meshes, and d) Patient-specific MEF analysis directly from medical images (2D or 3D) – simulation of surgical implants.

I have published more than 40 journal papers, several of them co-authored with well-known researchers like Profs. Zienkiewicz (Swansea Univ), Wiberg (Chalmers), Oñate and Díez (Polytechnic Univ. of Catalonia), Chinesta (ENSAM-Paris), Allix (Paris-Saclay) and Bordas (Luxembourg Univ). I have participated as PI of the Spanish group in a FP7 project (Initial Training Network), in 10 projects of the Spanish National Plan (4 as PI) and in 3 regional projects (1 as PI).

I have participated in technology transfer activities with companies and other entities, being the main ones Gec Alsthom, Patentes Talgo SL, La Fe Hospital (Valencia) and Cerámica Meridiano SAU – Cermer.

I have organized of 2 international conferences in the field of computational mechanics. I’m a member of several scientific societies. In particular, I am a member of the executive board of the Spanish Society of Numerical Methods in Engineering.

During the last years, through these contacts, projects and the 6 PhD theses supervised (5 more ongoing), my research activities focused on the development of a FEM-based analysis methodology, the Cartesian Grid FEM (cgFEM). CgFEM is a very efficient numerical simulation methodology thanks to the use of Cartesian meshes independent of the geometry and to a hierarchical data structure, fully coupled to the mesh, that allows for the reuse of many calculations, considerably reducing the computing time taken by the simulations. The characteristics of cgFEM have been used to develop a methodology to automatically obtain FE models directly from medical images. This methodology allowed us to use computational mechanics in an area of great social interest such as the area of personalized medicine, in particular in the structural simulation of bone-implant systems for preoperative prosthetic patient-specific implant simulations. The complexity of biological models has recently led my research lines also to the development of new methodologies based on Machine Learning and Model Order Reduction techniques to model these systems. This new research line of the Institute of Research in Mechanical and Biomechanical Engineering – UPV, integrated by 6 senior researchers 6 PhD students and 1 Postdoc fellow, is being developed in close collaboration with Dr Nadal.