Structural Dynamics on Your Computer
Some things to know before you start (or while) swearing at your computational model
Presented By: Sumanth Cheruku
Abstract:
Did you ever spend hours building and running an analysis model, only to get results that do not make sense? There are several reasons for this quandary. While some of these reasons include providing an inaccurate boundary condition or utilizing an inappropriate connection model, other reasons are more nuanced and depend on our understanding of the numerical analysis itself. We shall explore this domain in this presentation – which is: you model everything accurately but do not have enough knowledge of what the program is doing to explain your results or solve the issue at hand.
The example of a cable - what happens when you pluck a horizontal, tensioned cable - will be used as an example in this presentation. The inscrutable results obtained from this simulation will be investigated using various mechanisms that can potentially explain it. A simple physical problem with an intuitive expectation of the behavior will lead to some enigmatic results depending on the parameters chosen for analysis and the analysis method itself.
This presentation will explore the black box that is the computational analysis package, and what happens when ‘Run analysis’ is clicked. Some mechanisms that play a dominant role in the numerical modeling and analysis will be explored through easily (relative) perceptible examples and later applied to the problems in structural dynamics.
Bio:
Sumanth Cheruku is a Project Engineer with Thornton Tomasetti, Inc. in their Austin office and a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. His current research includes studying and modeling response of long cables in unsteady, longitudinally sheared wind flow due to vortex-induced vibrations using 3D Large-Eddy Simulations. He is the secretary of Chapter 29 of the ASCE 7 standard for 2022 cycle, chair of a Wind Engineering Division (ASCE) subcommittee on aerodynamic phenomena and a member of the Structural Dynamics Technical Committee with AIAA. He is an active member of ASCE – Forensic Division, SEI, ACI, NACE and an associate member of ASME and AIAA.
