Civil and Environmental Engineering
Description of field of research
Digital imaging and 3D printing are increasingly being applied in the design and manufacturing in the fields of civil, mechanical, material, biomedical and other disciplines of engineering and science. Conventional computational methods for structural analysis require great human efforts to convert design models created by these technologies to numerical models and to achieve results of desired accuracy.
This research aims to develop a full automatic approach to perform structural analysis directly from the design models. Work could involve the development of novel algorithm for the creation of numerical models from point clouds, digital images and stereolithography models, adaptive stress analysis using the scaled boundary finite element method, and development of graphical user interfaces for pre- and post-processing. Computer code for automated structural analysis will be developed on a high-performance computing facility.
Strong analysis and computing skills are required for this project. Experience with high-performance and cloud computing is high desirable. The project can be tailored to the interest of the student.
School
Research Area
Computational structural analysis | Digital twin
- Research Environment
- Expected Outcomes
- Supervisory team
- Reference Material/Links
The student will work with the computational mechanics group at the Centre for Infrastructure Engineering and Safety. This project team has more than 10 members consisting of academic staff, postdoctoral research fellows and PhD students. This project will be built on the recent work of our research team. Access to scientific computing facilities will be provided.
This project will explore possibilities to establish a novel approach for computer simulation of structures by integrating modern technologies for design with advanced numerical techniques. The outcome will be an automated and efficient numerical tool that can be applied to structural analysis and design. At the completion of the project, the student is expected to have
- Acquired analytical and computational knowledge and skills required for this project
- Contributed original ideas to achieve project goals
- Contributed to the development of an in-house computer program
- Carried out verifications and benchmarking of the numerical techniques and computer program.
- Contributed to the writing of refereed journal publication(s) based on the research outcome.
- Song, Ch. (2018), The Scaled Boundary Finite Element Method: Introduction to Theory and Implementation, John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
- Zhang, J.Q, Ankit, A., Gravenkamp, H., Eisentrager, S. and Song, Ch. (2021) A massively parallel explicit solver for elasto-dynamic problems exploiting octree meshes, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Vol. 380, 11381. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2021.113811
- A polytree based coupling method for non-matching meshes in 3D, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, Vol. 349, 743-773. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2019.02.038
- Saputra, A., Talebi, H., Tran, D., Birk, C. and Song, Ch. (2017) Automatic image-based stress analysis by the scaled boundary finite element method, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, Vol. 109, 697-738. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/nme.5304