The University of Chile invites applications for three full time tenure-track faculty positions in Mechanical Engineering. Applicants must have deep interest in undergraduate and graduate teaching, as well as the purpose to conduct long-term, externally funded research programs at international level. Candidates are also expected to maintain fruitful work relationships with industry in their respective areas. According to qualifications, they may be ranked at the Assistant or Associate Professor level.

Candidates are sought in three areas:

As we all know, finite element matrices are sparse and many memory can be saved if their sparsity is exploited. Due to the latter, we are often provoked to declare the nxn stiffness matrix as a sparse one just before the element loop. Be careful of this method since the larger the matrix the slower the assembly operations. There is a better and more efficient way to code the assembly procedure in Matlab. I will show how to accomplish this.

I have posted a meshfree class implemented in C++ in my web site. Although this is nothing new (which is why I am releasing it), it might be useful for some of you. Its capabilities include the computation of first order maximum entropy (maxent) basis functions and first order moving least squares (mls) basis functions along with their corresponding derivatives. It is a generic code in the sense that it can compute the aforementioned basis functions in one, two and three dimensions with just one single code. If you have comments or find a bug, please do let me know. It is available for Windows and Linux. The code along with its manual can be downloaded from here.

Hello all,

I am studying some simple finite elements for 2d near-incompressible analysis. Particularly, I am interested in the MINI element. It is basically a 3-node triangle element with nodal pressure and displacement degree of freedoms enriched by a bubble function. Could someone that has some experience with these elements point me out about advantages and drawbacks of using these type of elements?

Thanks,

Alejandro.

I would like to share the following information to all the iMechanica users interested in using TAUCS a library of sparse linear solvers. TAUCS is among the most used libraries of sparse linear solvers and, to my knowledge, its closest equivalent library is SuperLU. For your reference, TAUCS is used in the commercial software Mathematica by Wolfram Research. Its source code can be downloaded from

http://www.tau.ac.il/~stoledo/taucs