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Winds of Change: Bentley’s Newest Advancements in Offshore Wind 

The SACS and MOSES offshore engineering applications from Bentley empower engineers to design offshore wind farms even more accurately and efficiently than ever before. Key Benefits of Using Bentley’s MOSES and SACS Wind Turbine Software: With MOSES, you can now simulate real-time turbine behavior, including wind-responsive control systems for the most accurate floating turbine designs yet.  SACS Wind Turbine can cut design time by up to 50% and reduce project costs by 40% or more.  Teams can seamlessly collaborate across disciplines using MOSES-SACS interoperability.  The Global Rise of Offshore Wind Energy As the world moves toward using cleaner energy, offshore wind power is becoming a key part of the global shift. These wind farms, built in the ocean, have huge potential to create large amounts of renewable electricity. They are growing quickly along coastlines in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. This growth is changing how we get our energy and is also increasing the need for offshore systems to be more accurate, safe, and efficient. Market Growth and Investment As global energy demand continues to rise, driven by population growth, bigger cities, and the shift to electric cars and industries, there is more pressure than ever to use clean and

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How advanced finite element analysis can prepare buildings for the unthinkable

While most structural analysis software can evaluate everyday stresses, they often fail to prepare buildings for extreme events. As environmental disasters and severe weather become more frequent, clients demand greater confidence in building safety. Engineers need better tools to ensure their designs can withstand these challenges. Buildings live complicated lives. The day any large piece of infrastructure is completed is the day it also opens itself to the unknown. Unpredictable events, from fires and floods to earthquakes and explosions, will fiercely test the structure—perhaps well beyond the questions asked of it in the original design. According to the United Nations, climate-related disasters in 2020 caused more than 15,000 deaths with 98 million people affected, plus an economic cost of $171bn.* In 2023 there were a total of 399 natural disasters, with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs noting that economic losses had now topped the $200bn mark.** For buildings to survive and protect the lives of the people using, working, or living within them requires an extra level of resilience; an inner ‘toughness’ that can be difficult to assess using most structural analysis software. While most such software is equipped to meet prescriptive design codes requirements—the everyday

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FSI Analysis of a Hydroelectric Power Plant

Hydroelectric power plants are used for economic and environmentally friendly electric power generation all around the world. One of the technical challenges in the design of such structures is to consider the fluid-structure interaction effects. For example, when the water pressure fluctuates as it passes through the fluid passage and the hydraulic turbine, it creates a pulsatile loading that causes vibration of the powerhouse structure. Displacement (magnified) In this blog post, we present some results of a study dealing with the vibrations of a powerhouse structure due to the fluid-structure interaction, obtained using ADINA. Figure 1 depicts a schematic of the powerhouse structure, the fluid passage, and the turbine. Figure 2 shows the finite element model of the coupled system. The nonlinear transient response of the coupled system was solved using 3000 implicit integration time steps, with a time step of 0.002 seconds (see Ref). The fluid was modeled as a Navier-Stokes fluid. The turbulent behavior of the fluid was modeled using the shear stress transport (SST) model. The sliding mesh boundary condition was used to incorporate the large rotations of the turbine blades. Figure 1: Schematic of the powerhouse Figure 2: Finite element mesh of the (a) powerhouse structure

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Simulation of Buckling of Bridge Braces — the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) initiated the California Toll Bridge Seismic Retrofit Program to determine the vulnerability of California’s major toll bridges to damage associated with strong earthquakes and to design retrofits to improve seismic safety. ADINA was selected by Caltrans and contractors in this Retrofit Program. A very important part in the bridge analyses is the modeling of the braces in the bridge structures (a photograph of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is shown below). Typical braces, which are laced built up members with rivets, were tested in the laboratory. Since there are many such braces in each bridge structure, it was necessary to establish a simple and effective finite element model of a typical brace. In the following we briefly describe, courtesy of SC Solutions, California, the modeling and verification of the behavior of these braces using the ADINA moment-curvature beam elements. This ADINA capability has proven to be of major importance for the nonlinear analyses of bridges. For the verification study, braces subjected to axial and flexural stresses were modeled in detail with shell elements, and then simplified with the moment-curvature beam elements in ADINA. The following figures show that a drastic reduction in degrees of

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