Architecture

Spudcans are conical footings used as foundations for offshore platforms. Installation in soft marine soil forces them deeply into the seabed, inducing gross motion and severe plastic deformation in the soil. A pure Lagrangian-based finite element approach for modeling spudcan installation and extraction can be very difficult. Because the mesh moves with the material, ele-ment distortion typically accompanies severe deformation and convergence difficulties follow.

On August 1, 2007, the I-35W highway bridge over the Mississippi river in Minneapolis, MN collapsed. The sub-sequent National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation identified the U10W truss node as a likely initiation site for the failure. (Bridge main truss nodes were numbered from the south starting at 0. U indicates a node along the upper chord, and L indicates a node along the lower chord. E and W indicate a node on the east or west truss) [1, 2, 3].

Assessing the strength of soil slopes and investigating the means for increasing their safety against failure are cru-cial in construction projects involving large soil masses. Slope stability analyses have traditionally been performed using a limit state approach. However, any presence of reinforcement or local heterogeneity necessitates the use of numerical techniques such as finite element analysis. Abaqus/Standard can be used for modeling reinforced soils and can thus help geotechnical engineers in deter-mining optimal reinforcement sizes and placement con-figurations.

Pullout resistance of driven foundation piles often in-creases with time in a process known as pile “setup.” The consolidation of the surrounding soil after the pile is driven plays a dominant role in the setup process. Finite element modeling of pile setup can help in obtaining reli-able estimates of the increase in pile resistance, which would allow for reductions in pile lengths, pile sections, or sizes of the pile driving equipment.

Finite element modeling of prestressed concrete contain-ment vessels (PCCVs, Ref. 1) for nuclear power plants poses special challenges. PCCVs, which are heavily rein-forced structures, are designed to deform beyond the cracking limits of the concrete. Abaqus has been used extensively for analyzing such structures in the nuclear utility industry (Ref. 2) and can be used to assess and improve the performance of these and other similar rein-forced concrete structures.

Construction of earthen dams entails sequential place-ment and compaction of soil layers and the subsequent fill-up of the embanked reservoir. In the design of earthen dams, two potentially critical events must be considered: the rapid emptying (or drawdown) of the reservoir and the dynamic loading of an earthquake. The possibility of dam failure in these situations depends on the respective build-up and dissipation of the fluid pore pressure in the soil.

Oblique elastic impact of spheres and the related case for cylinders have been studied cases for many years in simulations of systems with loose supports, such as heat exchanger tube-support interaction, as well as granular flows and robotic task modeling. The problem is a relative simple one in the class of transient frictional contact problems in that the stresses away from the contact zone are typically neglected. The available continuum model solutions from literature show some very interesting features.

The fire resistance of steel framed multi story buildings and their ability to withstand
exposure to fully developed fire conditions without the need for all structural members to be

Due to the limitation of computer capacity and the soften of the material constitution, the nonlinear dynamic earthquake analyses of skyscrapers are not practical in engineer’s desktop, and even in the research area they are still open problems. Utilizing ABAQUS’s unique combination of implicit and explicit technologies and capable of solving large problem efficiently, the author solves the problem elegantly and practically. In the analysis model, all members and shear-walls are modeled by plastic zone model, and large deflection effects are taking into account.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigates accidents to identify the probable cause and to make recommendations that would prevent similar accidents. Following the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis on August 1, 2007, the NTSB worked with the Federal Highway Administration, the Minnesota Department of Transportation and other parties with information and expertise, including SIMULIA Central, to determine the circumstances that contributed to the collapse of the bridge, completing the investigation in 15 months.

There are plans of constructing bridges longer span like Messina strait bridge. This
trend causes the necessity of discussing on the problems of instability analysis such as lateraltorsional buckling. However, lateral torsional buckling analysis of long span bridge is not
sufficiently taken yet. For that reason, we apply the Abaqus/Standard to solve the high nonlinear problem. The analysis object is Akashi-kaikyo Bridge which is the longest bridge in the world. This paper presents how to analyze the lateral-torsional buckling of long span bridge applying wind load.

Abaqus is often applied to solve geomechanical boundary value problems. Several Abaqus built-in features enable a wide range of simulating such problems. For complex problems Abaqus can be extended via user subroutines. Several extensions for soil mechanics purposes are discussed and corresponding case studies are presented.

Conical piles of granular solids can be found in many industrial sites. These piles are

This research involves a failure analysis of the internal structural collapse that occurred in World Trade Center 5 due to fire exposure alone on September 11, 2001. It is hypothesized that the steel column-tree assembly failed during the heating phase of the fire. Abaqus/Standard was used to predict the structural performance of the assembly when exposed to the fire. Results from a finite element, thermal-stress model confirms this hypothesis, for it is concluded that the catastrophic, progressive structural collapse occurred approximately 2 hours into the fire exposure.

This paper aims to investigate the train-induced ground vibration and appropriate

Compared with response spectrum method and the pushover method, Elasto-plastic dynamic time-history analysis method is considered to be a more accurate seismic analysis method. Because of Abaqus’s strong non-linear calculation function, the software makes it possible for the method mentioned above to be applied. Elasto-plastic dynamic analysis on complex structures using Abaqus has a rapid development in China.

The connected structure refers to the kind of building which is composed of two or more
towers connected by the connecting body in a certain height, belonging to the irregular building
structure system. According to “Technical Specification for Concrete Structures of Tall Building”

During the BIW concept developing phase, some key design variables, such as rails and pillars width and position, shell thickness, etc, and multi-attribute responses from safety, NVH, and durability are considered to explore the design space. Isight DOE design drive is used to assess the impact of the variables on the objectives, and this helps the engineer to better understand the design space and give design recommendation. Approximations component is used sequentially to create fast-running surrogate models to replace the real CAE simulations.

In dynamic analysis of NPP civil structures the most suitable method proved to be the method of direct integration of equations of motion of the structure-soil system. This method takes account of geometrically nonlinear effects and dashpots with high level of attenuation. In addition, this method allows for receiving a highly effective solution for some types of NPP civil structures. However, the analysis of resultant response spectra has showed a high level of spectral accelerations at elevations of equipment arrangement.