This 4-year BOF Basic Research Funding project will support the research activities carried out in Finite Element Modelling Research Group (FEMRG) at Ghent University. FEMRG is a sub-division of Laboratory Soete, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, and is specialized in Finite Element Method (FEM) and its application to a wide range of engineering disciplines. The research in FEMRG concentrates on modelling contact problems, fatigue crack initiation and propagation, and the phenomena of fretting fatigue and fretting wear. Currently, FEMRG comprises 18 PhD students and 2 post-doctoral researchers, who conduct scientific research into the behaviour of several complex engineering problems using FEM and other numerical techniques. Some of the current research topics include finite element modelling of fretting wear of steel wires, modelling multiaxial fatigue behaviour of nuclear materials and numerical simulation of fretting fatigue behaviours of titanium alloy treated by ultrasonic surface rolling process​.