I have been asked a few times about where to begin with studying the finite element method. There are a few schools of thought on this:
If you have a lot of time (~4 months) to learn FE from a materials modelling context this is a strong way to start:
If I could do things all over again I would go with itunes U. Which didn’t exist when I started down this road. If you love lectures and the soothing sound of a german FE genius then you could not go wrong with Klaus-Jürgen Bathe. An MIT professor who is accepted as an expert in computational mechanics. His wiki page can fill you in on the details but you know your material when you have over 5 honorary doctorates in the field.
His itunes U (MIT) lectures are a great starting point.
Follow that up with:
K. J. Bathe, Finite Element Procedures, Prentice Hall, 1996.
Then if you are in material science and you want to get elbow deep with ABAQUS I recommend “Introduction to Computational Plasticity” by Fionn Dunne. After Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr….. Bathes’ books this would make you fearless when it comes to continuum mechanics modelling with FE (I do not include crystal plasticity in that statement).
That is about 3 week of work there and 3 - 4 notebooks of silly mistakes but everyone should make it.
Now you should have 3 months to practice.
As always my disclaimer is don’t blame me if this goes very wrong. The views expressed here are my personal ones and do not reflect that of my employers past, present or future. I count sleep as time you could have spent doing work.
Rizgar
I am very guilty of not making my work accessible. A very simple and short talk from TED really has helped me explain things.
I present Talk Nerdy To Me:
Welcome, My name is Rizgar Mella.
Contact me via email: rizgar “at” outlook “dot” com
I am a soon to be graduate of Imperial College London with a Doctorate in Materials Modelling from the Centre for Nuclear Engineering.
The application of numerical techniques to nuclear materials problems has been my primary focus for some number of years. Modelling with meshed and mesh-free techniques was applied to material performance problems ultimately to identify life limiting thermal; mechanical or chemical processes. This is inclusive of fatigue calculations in custom developed nuclear fuel performance codes.
I have tried to remain at the forefront of materials modelling by developing many enhancements within commercial finite element codes. Enhancing ABAQUS in the areas of multi-physics and the development of implicit fracture techniques, simultaneously collecting a great deal of experience in scientific programing; large scale data analysis; distributed; shared and cloud supercomputing. Heavily involved with several open source projects and enjoy engaging with the modelling community through discussion at conferences and other forums. I regularly reach for collaboration and discussion in the modelling community.
Previously Recieving a Masters in Theoretical Physics at Royal Holloway, University of London
Numerical Methods
Finite Element, Finite difference, Mesh-free methods (peridynamics and smoothed particle hydrodynamics), (moveable) cellular automata, Isotope Inventory Codes and Molecular Dynamics
Scientific Packages
ABAQUS (6.9/6.10/6.11/6.12/CAE/input and user subroutine development), MATLAB, FEnICS, LAMMPS and a large selection of numerical libraries.
Computational Experience
Greater than 3 years programming experience with (Unless otherwise stated): Fortran 77/90/95, C, C++, CUDA (2 years), python, OpenMP, MPI, OpenACC (1 year)
High performance computing, cloud computing (Amazon), Big data, design and use of shared memory and distributed memory clusters.
Experienced user of Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Experienced in scientific publishing with Latex and various desktop publishing suites.
For a list of publications and conferences please contact me.
