Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-189).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 130-138).

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains x, 101 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-101).

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-75).

No description available.

In the present thesis, a computational framework for the analysis of coupled hydro-fracture flow in deformable porous media using a Finite/Discrete Element Method is presented. In this context, a series of developments have been made in order to provide a more efficient and robust numerical model capable of dealing with oil production and slope stability problems. The mechanical response of the skeleton is highly dependent on its seepage behaviour as pore pressure modifications affect the in situ stress field. The u-p formulation has been employed using an explicit time integration scheme where fully saturated and single-phase partially saturated analysis are incorporated for 2-D and 3-D cases. Owing to their inherent simplicity, low order elements provide an excellent framework in which contact conditions coupled with crack propagation can be dealt with in an effective manner. For linear elements this implies single point integration which, however, can result in spurious zero-energy modes. Therefore, in order to obtain reliable results, a stabilization technique has been devised to eliminate hourglassing. The success of the modelling strategy ultimately depends on the interdependence of different phenomena. The linking between the displacement components, network and pore pressures represents an important role in the efficiency of the overall coupling procedure. Therefore, a master-slave technique is proposed to link seepage and network fields, proving to be particularly attractive from a computational cost point of view. Another important development that has provided substantial savings in CPU times is the use of an explicit-explicit subcycling scheme. Numerical examples have been used to assess the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed framework. Special attention is focused on the investigation of hydraulic fracture propagation in oil production problems and plane failure analysis of the stability of slopes.

No description available.

Following a stochastic approach, this thesis presents a numerical framework for elastostatics of random media. Firstly, after a mathematically rigorous investigation of the popular white noise model in an engineering context, the smooth spatial stochastic dependence between material properties is identified as a fundamental feature of practical random media. Based on the recognition of the probabilistic essence of practical random media and driven by engineering simulation requirements, a comprehensive random medium model, namely elementary random media (ERM), is consequently defined and its macro-scale properties including stationarity, smoothness and principles for material measurements are systematically explored. Moreover, an explicit representation scheme, namely the Fourier-Karhunen-Loeve (F-K-L) representation, is developed for the general elastic tensor of ERM by combining the spectral representation theory of wide-sense stationary stochastic fields and the standard dimensionality reduction technology of principal component analysis. Then, based on the concept of ERM and the F-K-L representation for its random elastic tensor, the stochastic partial differential equations regarding elastostatics of random media are formulated and further discretized, in a similar fashion as for the standard finite element method, to obtain a stochastic system of linear algebraic equations. For the solution of the resulting stochastic linear algebraic system, two different numerical techniques, i.e. the joint diagonalization solution strategy and the directed Monte Carlo simulation strategy, are developed. Original contributions include the theoretical analysis of practical random medium modelling, establishment of the ERM model and its F-K-L representation, and development of the numerical solvers for the stochastic linear algebraic system. In particular, for computational challenges arising from the proposed framework, two novel numerical algorithms are developed: (a) a quadrature algorithm for multidimensional oscillatory functions, which reduces the computational cost of the F-K-L representation by up to several orders of magnitude; and (b) a Jacobi-like joint diagonalization solution method for relatively small mesh structures, which can effectively solve the associated stochastic linear algebraic system with a large number of random variables.

In this research, the finite element method (FEM) was used to solve the nonlinear, incompressible, transient, three dimensional Navier-Stokes equations in their non-conservative form. Linear tetrahedron elements were employed with the elegant, equal order interpolation for both pressure and velocity. The characteristic based split scheme was formulated in a fully implicit manner to circumvent the time step restrictions of the classical explicit formulations. The monolithic (single step, fully coupled solution procedure for pressures and velocity) form of the CBS scheme was also derived and its suitability was positively demonstrated. Casting the CBS scheme in a monolithic framework, results in the generation of a pressure stabilization term in the mass conservation equation, thereby circumventing the LBB restriction by the elimination of the zero pressure block. An account of all the steps involved in discretizing the Navier-Stokes equations (both in split and monolithic frameworks) was presented in meticulous detail, which included the derivation of the convective and pressure stabilization terms, linearization of the non-linear terms and the consequent derivation of the highly efficient analytical jacobian matrix, along with the temporal and spatial discretizations of the corresponding terms. The monolithic and the split version of the CBS scheme were integrated into a parallel, scalable and extensible Fortran90 software called IFENs. The development of IFENs started during the course of this research and all of its components have been designed and implemented by the author of this thesis. Multi processor parallelism was achieved using the Intel implementation of the most widely used/preferred, Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. The parallel support needed for the use of a variety of parallel, linear, iterative solvers belonging to the Krylov subspace family (e.g. GMRES and its variants, CG, BiCG, BiCG- stab, etc.), parallel non linear solvers belonging to the Newton-Krylov family (line search newton, trust region newton, nonlinear GMRES, etc.) and parallel preconditioners (incomplete LU, Additive Shwarz Method - ASM, algebraic multigrid, etc.), was provided by the incorporation of PETSc into IFENs. PETSc is a state of the art, non-trivial toolkit, which represents a collection of several parallel libraries useful in high performance scientific computing. Keeping in mind the specific requirements of IFENs, a custom mesh partitioner was implemented. It operated on meshes that were renumbered using bandwidth reducing algorithms like Revere Cuthill Mckee. The possibility of using established domain decomposition libraries like ParMETIS was explored and demonstrated to be counter productive for the demands of this research. After the preliminary testing and validation of the procedures adopted before and during the execution of IFENs, large, high definition domains representative of human arteries (specifically, carotid bifurcations, found in the neck) were considered and the complete incompressible set of Navier-Stokes equations were solved for pressure and velocity fields. During the tenure of this research more than 1000 recorded parallel test cases were executed to test various components of IFENs, as well as various simulations representative of a wide variety of problems. IFENs can easily handle meshes with tens of millions of elements. The largest mesh used for the purpose of this research contained 14.58 million tetrahedrons and 2.489 million nodes, which on average required just 7 minutes per timestep, while executing the classical split framework of the CBS scheme. Results from the simulation of 9 carotid meshes, representative of 4 carotid geometries were presented and found to be in good agreement with the available ultrasound data. The flow fields were analysed and post processed using different techniques for each case. The haemodynamic wall parameters like time averaged wall shear stress and oscillatory shear index were calculated and mapped onto the corresponding boundary nodes. The region in the carotid bifurcation susceptible to the deposition of plaques and consequent stenosis were pointed out and other anomalies were highlighted.

M.Ing. (Mechanical Engineering) / Please refer to full text to view abstract