Seminar - Chongmin Song - The Scaled Boundary Finite-Element Method

Wednesday 20 April 2011, 4.00 pm - 5.00 pm
Civil Engineering Conference Room

Associate Professor Chongmin Song
School of Civil & Environmental Engineering
University of New South Wales

Abstract:
The scaled boundary finite-element method is a numerical technique originally developed by Dr. J.P. Wolf and the speaker for the dynamic soil-structure interaction analysis. This method has since been taken up at international level by other researchers and applied to areas such as fracture mechanics, composite, fluid mechanics, fluid-structure interaction, acoustics, electromagnetism, etc.

The scaled boundary finite-element method is a semi-analytical method based on finite element technology. It not only combines many advantages of the finite element and boundary element methods but also presents appealing features of its own. This method is particularly attractive in modelling problems with unbounded domains or singularities as it handles the infinite values analytically. As only the boundary of a problem domain is discretized, the scaled boundary finite-element method offers greater flexibility and requires less effort in mesh generation than the finite element method does. This method can be coupled with standard finite elements straightforwardly and seamlessly.

A brief theoretical background of the scaled boundary finite-element method will be introduced so that the salient features of this method can be appreciated. Some recent advances and applications to dynamic soil-structure interaction and fracture mechanics will be presented. Current research activities of the speaker’s group (including shape sensitivity analysis of cracked structures, piezoelectric composites, polygonal elements, plates/shells and fractional differential equations) will be briefly introduced.


Biography
Dr. Chongmin Song is an Associate Professor at the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales. He obtained the degree of Bachelor of Engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 1984 and the degree of Doctor of Engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1990. He has about 20 years’ of academic and industrial experience in structural and geotechnical engineering. His current research interest is on advanced numerical methods and their application to civil engineering.