7/11/2012 By William Bowman
Written by By William Bowman
“I try to visit Illinois at least once a year,” Aravas said. “I have good friends here and there are a lot of opportunities for research collaborations.”
Originally from Greece, Aravas received his B.S. degree from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1980 before receiving his M.S. (1982) and Ph.D. (1984) degrees in Theoretical Applied Mechanics (TAM) from the University of Illinois.
Aravas chose to do his graduate work at Illinois because of the influence of Aristotle Professor George Lianis, who was previously a longtime faculty member at Purdue.
“It was a mixture of ignorance and trust of the professor that I did not apply to anywhere else,” Aravas said. “I applied here initially and received a teaching assistantship, which then changed to a research assistantship.”
Aravas was honored with the J.O. Smith Award for Teaching Excellence in 1982 when he had a teaching assistantship at Illinois.
After earning his Ph.D., he worked as a senior engineer at the company Hibbitt, Karlsson, and Sorensen, Inc. in Rhode Island and helped develop ABAQUS, a finite element program. In developing the program, he worked on the implementation of constitutive models with materials such as metals.
“He developed numerical integration algorithms for material systems that are used extensively by the mechanics community and have been implemented in commercial finite element codes such as ABAQUS. They are also used for the solution of important engineering problems,” MechSE Professor Petros Sofronis said in his introduction to Aravas’ distinguished lecture.
In 1986, Aravas joined the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked the next 11 years. During his time there he received the Presidential Young Investigator Award.
In 1996, he returned to Greece and became a professor of computational mechanics of structures at the University of Thessaly (UTH). He moved to the position of vice rector for research and development and chairman of the research committee and then was elected dean of engineering from 2004 to 2007. He later also served as chairman of the department of Mechanical Engineering and acting chairman of the departments of Civil Engineering and Computer and Communication Engineering at UTH.
Recently, he played a key role in establishing the Center for Research and Technology (CE.RE.TE.TH) and became the Director of Mechatronics Institute, which is connected to three other institutions: Institute of Technology and Management of Agriculture, Institute of Biomedical Research and Technology, and Institute of Human Performance and Rehabilitation. These facilities were created to advance innovation in the industrial section of Thessaly.
Aravas’ work continues to have an impact on composite materials, structures, metal forming, computer manufacturing and much more. His most recent research builds a model that predicts the stresses and the formations that develop in human muscles in response to exercise. This model will reveal the foot areas susceptible to injuries. It may also aid in the development of shoe design.
“The next application would be to see the effect that the shape and size of the shoe has with transmitting the load of our bodies to our foot,” Aravas said.
Aravas credits his success to the education he received at Illinois. He remembers the great experience he had working with Professor McMeeking, who supervised his doctoral work.
“If I hadn’t been a graduate student in TAM, I wouldn’t have had the career I had,” Aravas said. “The department was really good and the faculty was first rate.”