Good FEA Needs a Suspicious Mind

Introduction

Good FEA Needs a Suspicious Mind

About good practices in validation of Finite Element Models in Geotechnical Engineering

Date: 9th May 2019, 6:30pm

Venue: Godfrey Mitchell Theatre, ICE, One Great George Street, London, SW1P 3AA

Presented by: Dr Andrew Lees

The event is free to attend and no prior registration is required.

The BGA Early Career Group is pleased to invite you to the event Good FEA Needs a Suspicious Mind: About good practices in validation of Finite Element Models in Geotechnical Engineering, which will be held at the Godfrey Mitchell Theatre at the ICE on 9th May 2019.

FEA outputs should always be viewed with healthy suspicion – it’s part of the validation process. But FEA users are often in their early career while the experience to know whether FEA outputs are plausible grows throughout a career. How can that knowledge gap be bridged?

FEA should be viewed as a team activity, not a lonely pastime. Input decisions and output reviews should be discussed with the project team every step of the way, involving those with wider geotechnical experience but perhaps little knowledge of FEA. Everybody gains knowledge that way.

Validation is not simply a process of comparing outputs with measurements until they match, it should ensure that the governing aspects of ground behaviour in a project have been captured faithfully.

The importance of this will be demonstrated using the speaker’s experience of modelling geogrid applications. While fudging input parameters could sometimes get the right output, radical changes to the modelling approach and a team effort were needed to simulate the true mechanical behaviour of stabilising geogrids accurately.

Dr Andrew Lees

Andrew is Senior Application Technology Manager at Tensar International, Director of Geofem and Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton. He has 20 years of experience in the practical application of numerical analysis tools in geotechnical design, focusing more recently on geogrid applications since joining Tensar. He authored the textbook Geotechnical Finite Element Analysis published by the ICE in 2016 as well as the NAFEMS guidebook Obtaining Parameters for Geotechnical Analysis and was on the redrafting panel for Eurocode 7 Part 1. He coordinated the European COGAN project on improving competency in geotechnical numerical analysis and is a member of the NAFEMS Geotechnical Working Group. He is a Chartered Engineer and member of the ICE and BGA.

Please join us after the talk for drinks at the ICE bar, kindly sponsored by Tensar International.

A flyer for the event can be found here.

The event will be live streamed and online attendance is possible through this link.

For any queries or further info please contact: justyna.wieczorek@a2-studio.com

The event recording is now available here.