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Elastic Deformation of complex shapes?

Hi, I am wondering if CA / NKS can be used to evaluate the energetics of small elastic deformations of complex (ie. without the symmetries of a cylinder or box) strained objects. Thanks.

Alfred Hubler gave a talk related to this at NKS 2007. His talk title was "Accurate Low-Dimensional Discrete Models for Continuous Systems", and he described a general approach using difference equations to numerically solve problems that would be difficult using standard continuous analytic methods.

He does rely on some simplicities of the problem, in the case he focused on a separability of time scales of the motion (slow displacement and fast "ringing" e.g., of an elastic ball). But the basic idea of separating off aspects of the problem to be handled by finite differences might well work in your case.

His talk was "blogged" by Mike Pilat (in the audience), which might be useful as an overview -

http://wolframscience.typepad.com/w...d-hubler-a.html

Dr. Hubler is a physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana and director of the center for complex systems research there. His homepage is here -

http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/people/Hubler/

I hope this helps.