As Honorary Editor of Engineering and Computational Mechanics I enjoy seeing the breadth of civil engineering applications that are benefiting from application of solid and fluid mechanics methods. Thus this issue of Engineering and Computational Mechanics contains an in-depth review of the application of the Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) fluid mechanics modelling technique to slender structures, a study of the application of the Discrete Element Method (DEM) to concrete elements and a description of how the Differential Transformation Method (DTM) can be used to model vibrations of structural elements such as buried pipelines and piles.
Through the development of methods that allow problems to be modelled more faithfully and/or more computationally efficiently, engineers are able to make more informed decisions. This can bring clear economic benefits or, in relation to the current climate crisis, can lead to the development of more materially efficient designs, with reduced embodied carbon, or to methods that can confirm that existing infrastructure is safe to use without intervention for extended periods.
In the first paper by Daniels and Xie (2022), the potential for the LES numerical technique to be used to evaluate the performance of slender structures to wind loading is reviewed. For large structures such as cable supported bridges or tall buildings, wind tunnel tests are time consuming and expensive to perform, making numerical techniques such as LES attractive. However, the interactions being modelled are highly complex and, as pointed out by the authors, using LES to estimate the resonant responses (and wind loading) of even a section of a long-span bridge is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, the authors are optimistic, observing that at the present time numerical and experimental methods complement each other, providing a hybrid means of assessing performance, and noting that results from recent studies of high-rise buildings and long-span bridges are encouraging.
In the second paper by Marooden and Rahimi (2022), the DEM is used to numerically model the behaviour of concrete specimens loaded in uniaxial compression. Unlike most previous studies, the authors propose a fully three-dimensional model of specimens, with the experimentally adopted aggregate size simulated in the model – albeit with the concrete aggregate modelled using spherical particles for sake of simplicity. It is reported that a benefit of the model is that it can identify microscopic cracks that are not visible in laboratory tests.
In the final paper by Khabiri and Javadi (2022) the well known beam on elastic foundations problem is considered, within this contribution the focus being on determining the vibration response of structural elements such as buried pipelines and piles. The authors employ the DTM, which relies on a Taylor series expansion of the underpinning differential equations. As such, it is observed that an advantage of DTM compared with numerical methods is that closed-form solutions can be obtained. The authors also report that DTM is easy to implement and, unlike other methods, is not reliant on initial assumptions.
