Design of a versatile engineering simulation environment for coupled continuous-discontinuous simulation

To overcome the difficulty of integrating continuous/discontinuous numerical methods to a software and retain its flexibility at the same time, National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) under National Applied Research Laboratories (NARL) in Taiwan has designed a Versatile Engineering Simulation ENvironment (named VESEN), which is a coupled continuous-discontinuous simulation platform based on Vector Form Intrinsic Finite Element (VFIFE) method and Discrete Element Method (DEM). Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) technology and design patterns in software engineering are used to facilitate VESEN's software usability and extensibility for adapting future requirement changes involving various constitutive laws, contact detection algorithms, geometric shapes of elements, interaction solvers, control points (in VFIFE method), and member sections. This paper presents the software framework of VESEN with a concept of "solver pool" and illustrates an iterative simulation procedure for ensuring the simulation consistency between rigid and deformable elements. Currently, VESEN has been successfully prototyped and tested in studying seismic behavior of bridge models with functional bearings. It can be expected that VESEN can address large-scale deformation and collapse of buildings and soil-structure interaction problems in the future.