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Performance Based Design: Leveraging Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to Calculate Wind, Water, and Airblast Loads

  • 19 Jun 2018
  • 11:45 AM - 1:00 PM
  • Maggiano's Little Italy North Park

Registration

 Performance-Based Design: Leveraging Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

 to Calculate Wind, Water, and Airblast Loads

Tim Brewer, CEng MICE

 Senior Engineer, Protection Engineering Consultants (PEC)

 

While acknowledging the effectiveness, robustness, and simplicity of engineering design codes, there are increasing opportunities to leverage performance-based design methods.  Such methods are particularly important for unique, complex, and irregular scenarios and geometries, where simplified analytical methods are likely to be invalid, inadequate, or grossly conservative.  Physical testing to better understand these challenging scenarios and geometries can be costly and time-consuming, and so increasingly engineers are turning to computational methods for modeling and simulation to support engineering design work (or to supplement and/or streamline a physical test program).

A combination of abundant and cost-effective remote computational resources and community-based open-source software development presents today’s engineer with a dizzying array of tools, which can be difficult to navigate, use, and apply to real project work.

This jargon-free briefing is aimed at the engineering generalist, not the deep technical expert. It will provide insight on the availability, validation, and application of high-fidelity modeling and simulation codes, with a practical focus on the use of freely-available and open source CFD software codes to calculate wind, water, and airblast loads on structures. The briefing will also (hopefully) underscore the potential value that advanced analysis can lend to real project work in today’s climate of increasing demand for better efficiency, more resilience, and less cost.

About the speaker: 

Tim Brewer is a Chartered Civil Engineer with over 16 years of experience in the assessment, design, and construction of complex engineering solutions.  He has led advanced research and testing programs and developed unique, innovative analytical methodologies and software tools for both commercial clients and U.S. federal agencies.

Tim has experience in the development, extension, and use of computational modeling tools, including high-fidelity physics-based codes, to better understand loading environments and material/structural response subject to these loads.

He currently manages a diverse range of engineering design, assessment, and R&D projects – from the complex analysis of glazed facades and curtain walls for sports stadia, to leveraging machine-learning to develop 3-dimensional hexahedral meshing software for DARPA.

1.0 Professional Development Hour 

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