Dr. Del Cid is an R&D and Professional Engineer with a PhD in mechanical engineering from Colorado School of Mines. Her areas of research vary in the fields of solid mechanics, applied mathematics, and computer sciences.

Her work examines the fields of food processing, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, agriculture, mining, and oil & gas among others. Her passion is understanding the world around us and finding creative ways to numerically simulate and solve complex problems; developing a kind of “toolbox” for numerical modeling advanced mechanical behavior. Her current work is in particle shape and cohesive contact modeling. In addition to her industry work, she has been an adjunct professor, teaching Finite Element Analysis in Computer Aided Engineering.

Granular materials cover a broad area of research from soil mechanics and powder technologies, to soft materials, even pharmaceuticals. Despite the wide variety, the discrete granular structure is generic and it’s approach a simple integration of the equations of motion for all the particulates in the system based on the contact forces and external forces acting on the particles.

The goal here is to provide information on the various methods and components of discrete numerical simulations not only from the author’s line of work and experience but also from the collective knowledge gathered from research papers, presentations, and conferences.