A FREE 2-DAYS SHORT COURSE ON NONLINEAR FINITE ELEMENT FORMULATIONS

 

Assalammualaikum and good day to all,

I am going to conduct a FREE 2-days short course on “Nonlinear Finite Element Formulation with MATLAB Source-coding (PART 1: One-dimensional)” next weekends (23rd -24th Feb/Saturday-Sunday) in UTM JB. The learning outcome (LO) and tentative program are given underneath.

Since this is FREE, I would like to invite all interested parties (i.e. undergrad final year students, postgrad students, young lecturers etc.) to participate in this short-course. Also, since this program will be the prerequisite to the PART 2: Two-dimensional which is to be held next month, insyaAllah, to focus on computational fluid dynamics (solution of Navier-Stoke’s equations), this series of short-courses should be of interest to parties from various fields (i.e. solid and structures, fluid mechanics and dynamics, soil mechanics, electromagnetic etc), so again, all are invited.

However, I need interested parties to response to these emails (ayasreen@utm.my or airilyasreen@yahoo.com ) by giving their name as soon as possible (before 12 midnight Wednesday 20th Feb) as I need to make a headcount for the booking of the venue. I will response to each of these emails on Friday eve (21st Feb) to inform about the actual venue as well to provide hands-out.

Learning Outcome:

At the end of this short-course, participants are expected to:

1. Get a grasp of the fundamental understanding of Finite Element Method (i.e. What is FEM?, When it is needed? Why it works? How it works? Who needs to know FEM? Why is it nonlinear? How to solve nonlinear problem?)

2. Be able to write simple linear and nonlinear FEM source-codes using MATLAB

Tentative Program:

(Saturday/23rd February 2012) – Linear Formulation

9.00am – 9.30am : Derivation of 1-D Differential Equations, Availability of Analytical Solutions and the Need for Numerical Solutions

9.30am – 10.30am : Introduction to Finite Element Method and Galerkin Weighted Residual

10.30am-11.00 : Break

11.00am-12.30pm: Descritization of the Linear Differential Equation by Galerkin Method

12.30pm-2.00pm: Lunch

2.00pm-3.00pm: Assembly of matrices and the solution of the descritized equilibrium equations

3.00pm-5.00pm: Development of Linear FEM source-code using Matlab

(Sunday/24th February 2012) – Nonlinear formulation

9.00am – 9.30am : Descritization of the 1-D Nonlinear Differential Equation by Galerkin Method

9.30am – 10.30am : Numerical Integration

10.30am-11.00 : Break

11.00am-12.30pm: Assembly of matrices and the nonlinear solution by Piccard’s Method

12.30pm-2.00pm: Lunch

2.00pm-3.00pm: Derivation of tangent stiffness matrix and the Newton-Raphson method

3.00pm-5.00pm: Development of Nonlinear FEM source-code using Matlab

Thank you so much and hope to see you all next week. InsyaAllah, its going to be FUN!!

Wassalam.

RUNNING, GUITAR AND JEALOUSY

I always told my students that I was a jealous man. So I ran and hit the gym to keep myself fit and my body in shape. I played badminton and other sports. I learned to play guitar and wrote song. I learned hard to be among the smartest guys and worked hard to be successful and got myself a BMW. I started to be expressive and rhetorical so that I could have followers. I basically tried to do many things and worked to be relatively good at them. Then I asked my student why all these?

So that I jealous no more. So that Lynn wishes no more. So that we can live happily ever after, insyaAllah. Because what jeopardizes marriage the most is jealousy. Once a man feels inferior, what comes next is a relationship crisis.

I told them that no man can stand his women having glary eyes at another man playing a guitar and sing beautiful love song. Or being outside the badminton court and watch his wife and children cheering at his officemates in an inter-department tournament, at time he was not good enough to get selected into the team.

And I told them that they still have 5 more years (more or less) to go before their marriage, so start to prepare. Start running, take guitar lesson, take up sports, learn hard, work hard etc. They still have time.

And I finally told them "Consider yourself as have been warned"

Oh ya, one more note on running. Dulu waktu supervisor PhD aku, Prof David Nethercot, datang Malaysia, dia tanya aku "Do you still run?" Aku jawab "Yes, I still do". Dia replied "Good. That's a smart guys activity Most people I know run". Dan aku setuju sangat dengan dia sebab to be smart all you need to do is to persevere in your learning and running trains you to be just that; persevere against your greatest enemy, that is YOU. When you run, you stop not because you are tired (although yourself keep telling you so) but because you are done. When you run, you run against the YOU in you. Same goes to learning. In fact, it goes the same in whatever we do. So guys, let's start running and train ourselves to persevere.

And one last note (I am actually saving record of my FB status related to this matter), this time its on the relationship between exercising and brain strength; my own hyphotesis. Brain, like any other muscles, can be made stronger by exercizing. What kind of exercize? Read n think, read n think. If you do this, believe me, you'll be suprised at the exponential relationship between these activities and your brains' strength; lower rate at first but a sudden jump after a decent period. Try it but like in other exercizes, you must presevere to see the result.