Design of a Versatile Engineering Simulation Environment for Coupled Continuous-Discontinuous Simulation

Design of a Versatile Engineering Simulation Environment for Coupled Continuous-Discontinuous Simulation

To address the complexity of integrating continuous/discontinuous numerical methods into a software but retain its flexibility at the same time, National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering(NCREE) under National Applied Research Laboratories(NARLabs) in Taiwan has developed a Versatile Engineering Simulation ENvironment(named VESEN), which is a coupled continuous-discontinuous simulation platform based on integration of Vector Form Intrinsic Finite Element(VFIFE) method and Discrete Element Method(DEM). Object-Oriented Programming(OOP) technology and design patterns in software engineering are used to facilitate VESEN’s software usability and extensibility for adapting future requirement changes involving various constitutive laws, contact detection algorithms, geometric shapes of elements, interaction solvers between elements, failure criteria, control points, relations between element and control points, and member sections. This paper presents the software framework of VESEN with a concept of “solver pool”. It can be expected that VESEN can simulate large-scale deformation and collapse of buildings and soil-structure interaction problems in the future.