About work.

Half of the week has passed and I actual have got work to do, already. My primary task is the modelation of an underground structure, a two tube tunneling - one three, one four lane tunnel – in Brisbane, Australia. Using this excavation model, I’m going to simulate the stresses and strain around it. This is done via a numerical program, in this case Examine3D by Rocscience, which calculates this data using a method similar to FEM, the so called boundary element method (BEM). Hence modeling of the excavation geometry means, discretizing its surfaces or meshing this surfaces with a 3dimensional triangulated boundary element net, in order to create a discrete series of equations a mathematical algorithm is able to calculate.

After getting used to the program, I’m right now searching and reading literature about the analysis and interpretation of the produced data, which is going to be the hardest part because the most theoretical, and due to it’s complexity ill occupy me at least the rest of the week.

I’m thinking back, two years now, when I failed in a course at university – numerical mathematics – and had to do it again. I was furious then, blaming the whole world but me, that this course was senseless, only created to give work to the institute for applied math, specific on only one actual program which was going to be outdated before I’d ever come to use it and over all to early in the 4^th term.

Well I still think it was to early in the 4^th, but knowing how to solve equation systems using Gauss-Seidel elimination procedures or what Q-R decomposition is, helps a lot when it comes to numerical simulation, which is exactly what I do. Who would have thought that, huh? :-P