CE 59700 - Modeling Large Deformations in Earth, Ocean, and Fractured Materials

Credits and contact hours:

  • 3 credits
  • Lecture meets 2 times per week for 75 minutes per meeting for 15 weeks

Specific course information:

  • Catalog description: Large deformations are ubiquitous in natural materials, as demonstrated by phenomena such as landslides, debris flows, coastal tsunamis, concrete cracking, ice sheet calving, and so on. Finite Element Method (FEM) is limited to small deformation analyses and cannot model post-failure behaviors. New numerical methods are being developed to simulate the entire instability process from the static stability analysis at small deformation to the dynamic post-failure run-out behavior. In this course, we introduce material point method (MPM), a “hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian” method to simulate large deformations and fractures of materials, with applications in geotechnical and coastal engineering, structural analysis, material science, geophysics, and computer vision.
  • Prerequisites: Familiarity with continuum mechanics and finite element method is recommended but not required. Familiarity with a programming language (MATLAB, Python, C++, etc) is recommended.
  • Course status: Technical elective, breadth course

Specific Goals for the course:

  • Student learning outcomes - Upon successful completion of this course the student shall be able to:
    • Introduce students to Lagrangian-based numerical methods available for engineering problem- solving
    • Introduce students to a computer language for scientific computing that supports parallelization
    • Expose students to concepts such as precision, errors and tolerances and their effect on the quality of the solutions produced by scientific computing
    • Case studies for landslides, material fracturing, and coastal engineering, with demo numerical codes provided
    • Conduct course projects using either material point method or smoothed particle hydrodynamics
  •  Relationship of course to program outcomes
    • Outcome 1: An ability to identify, formulate, and solve complex engineering problems by applying principles of engineering, science and mathematics.
    • Outcome 2: An ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences (assessment based on final project presentation).

Topics:

  • Introduction to material point method (MPM)
  • Introduction to smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH)
  • Introduction to an open-sourced MPM/SPH python package
  • Case study of landslides, material fracturing, and coastal engineering
  • Final projects using MPM/SPH to research topics that be of students' interests