Seminars, Workshops and Conferences
June 13, 2003: Seminar on Urban Flood Disaster Risk Management in Asian Cities will be held at 11:00 a.m. in Room E-206. The seminar will be conducted by Dr. Dushmanta Dutta, Visiting Associate Professor, SCE, AIT and Associate Professor, ICUS, IIS, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
Floods are by far the most frequent and devastating natural disasters in Asia and they are in increasing trend. Although the floods occurred in Asia during the last 28 years are about 40% of the total events around the world, they caused more than 98% of the total casualties. Rapid urbanization is a distinctive feature of Asia together with high rate of population growth. It is estimated that by 2015, more than 50% of mega cities are going to be in Asia. Due to the flat terrain and proximity to large rivers, most of the
cities in Monsoon Asia are vulnerable to flood disaster. For any adequate measures for flood disaster reduction, it is utmost important to understand and analyze the risk of system.
A system has been designed at the University of Tokyo, Japan for analyzing the risk of urban floods by integrating a physically based hydrological model and a loss assessment model. The system has been applied successful in several river basins in Asia. A
broad overview of the system and a few applications will be presented in this seminar together with an overview of the present trend of flood disasters in Asia and flood mitigation measures carried out in the past few decades for reduction of urban flood
disasters.
June 16, 2003: Seminar on Nonlinear Structural/Mechanical Dynamic Analysis UsingXFinas with GID Software will be held at
2:40 p.m. in room E - 220. The seminar wull be conducted by Dr. Kidu Kim, Associate Professor, SCE.
Abstract
The program based on the nonlinear finite element method, FINAS which is capable of the stability assessment of thin walled structures, was developed on a CDC-Main frame environment, at Imperial College, London (1984 & 1987). The general purpose
software, XFINAS which is an eXtended version of FINAS, has been developed on Window Operating system in AIT. A new program to be introduced will enable a powerful nonlinear dynamic structural analysis, taking into account of material inelasticity
and geometric nonlinearity. A large number of numerical testing have been carried out for the validation of XFINAS elements and are in very good agreement with the references. The pre- and post processing of XFINAS can be carried out by using GiD.
Thus, the new program will be efficient and powerful tool in comparison with the commercially available programs. Further research regarding car crash, loss of prestressing and tunnel excavation are going on and will be available in the XFINAS soon.
June 30, 2003: Seminar on 'Constitutive Modelling of Sand Based on the Concept of Hypoplasticity' will be held at 9:00 a.m. in room N240, SCE Building. The seminar will be conducted by Prof. Erich Bauer, Ao. Univ.-Prof., Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Techn., Institute of General Mechanics, Graz University of Technology, Austria.
Abstract
A special class of a hypoplastic constitutive model is proposed to describe the mechanical properties of granular materials like sand. The concept of hypoplasticity differs fundamentally from the concept of elastoplasticity as no decomposition of the strain into reversible and irreversible parts is needed. Furthermore, the flow rule and the stress limit condition are not described by separate functions in hypoplasticity but they are included in the evolution equation for the state variables. With a unified description of the interaction between pressure level and density the model can be applied to a wider range of pressures and densities, using only one set of constitutive constants. Micro-properties of granular materials manifested during shear banding can be taken into account with an extension of the classical continuum approach to a micro-polar continuum. The advantage of the hypoplastic concept not only lies in the simple formulation of the constitutive equations and their implementation in a finite element code but also in an easy adaptation of the constitutive constants to experiments. It is shown by comparing the predictions with the experimental data on dense and loose sand that the hypoplastic constitutive model is capable of reproducing the essential properties of sand under drained and undrained conditions
July 9-11, 2003:'Rural electrification and Distributed Generation for Sustainable Development' training workshop will be organized by Electric Power System Management, SERD, at the AIT Conference Center. Resource persons will be Prof. Surapong Chiratannon, Dr. Weerakorn Ongsakul, Dr. Mithulananthan N, Dr. S.N. Singh from IIT-Kanpur, and Mr. Alan D. Gonzales, EC-ASEAN COGEN Programme Phase III
Topics to be covered are:
- Rural Electrification and Its Need
- RE Schemes and Difficulties in Asia
- RE Supply Systems
- Social and Economic Benefits of RE
- Method of Demand Forecasting and Program Development
- Distributed Generation vs. Traditional Power Systems
- Cost and Economic Evaluation
- Wind Distributed Generation
- Cogeneration & Its importance
- Fuel Cell Powered Distributed Generator
- Solar-Thermal Power Generation
- Photovoltaic (PV) Generation
- Basic DG Case Example: What to Include and How?
- Grid Interconnection Option of DG
- Evaluation and Financing of DG Projects
A registration fee of US$150 (6,000 Baht) will be paid by participant. For attendees from government agencies, state enterprises, or universities, the registration fee is US$125 (5,000 Baht). Details of the workshop and registration form can be downloaded from:
http://www.serd.ait.ac.th/ep/epsm/REDGSD.PDF