# José Abell's research blog

## Using my gmshtranslator python tool to interface gmsh with opensees.

I wrote the gmshtranslator tool a while back during my PhD, to easily parse gmsh msh files to any other format. I’ve been using it for years now with not much change for both research and consulting, and have been contacted by other researchers that want to use it. I will soon write a tool, powered by gmshtranslator, to more easily translate from gmsh into OpenSees. Meanwhile, here is a short example on how to use gmshtranslator to create OpenSees models. The example assumes you know gmsh formats (.geo and .msh) and python.

The example consists on the simple …

## Paper03 - Earthquake Soil Structure Interaction of Nuclear Power Plants, differences in response to 3-D, 3 × 1-D, and 1-D excitations

Finally! First paper since PhD was accepted for publication. I’ll take this opportunity to start a tradition and review my own papers here. I think its important that I do this for several reasons. First, there are discussions that come up during peer review that are important but don’t make it into the paper. Misconceptions about the presented work can be clarified to a broader audience here. Also, I can say whatever I want, specially opinions and thoughts that come from intuition and might not make it through peer-review, I’ll be as critical as possible about these …

## Video of 2-D SSI model of an RC Shear Wall Building

The RC shear-wall building is modeled in OpenSees using non-linear fiber based beam column elements. Soil is modeled as a continuum using quad elements and linear stress-strain relationship. Soil shear wave-speed is varied in depth such as to obtain a $$V_{s30}$$ consistent with a class B site according to chilean seismic code. Lysmer-Kulhemeyer dashpots are used along the soil boundary to model seismic radiation and earthquake wave-field input.

The performance of the building will be assessed for varying site fundamental periods. This is an aspect of SSI that is not covered by the chilean seismic code, and has been …

## New cable element in OpenSees

With my student, Pablo Ibañez, we implemented a new catenary cable element in OpenSees. This element is based on the work by Salehi et al[1].

The stiffness of this element is obtained using a flexibility formulation. Basically the shape of the cable is determined by the integral:

## Testing IPython Notebook integration into Pelican

In this post I’ll make a small example meant to test the IPython notebook + Pelican integration thanks to the plugin created by danielfrg that can be found here.

Lets start out with some basic plotting!

I finally completed the transition from WordPress to Pelican. The moment was right. Pelican is more appropriate for me as it is much simpler to manage (I host my own webpage), more flexible in terms of what I can do with the blog, requires no php or database knowledge.

Pelican is a python powered static HTML generator. I set-up a heierarchy of folders where I store my content. Web content is generated using the Markdown text syntax. Pelican uses these markdown files and the folder structure to generate the website HTML.

Static HTML has some advantages over a database with …

## SNE # 01. Example of ESSI simulation and visualization with visitESSI

These are the results of a simple elastic-domain simulation. Mesh consists of

• 154523 Nodes (46359 DOFs)
• 1250 27 node bricks (LT formulation)
• 1200 time-steps (dt = 0.01s)

Results were stored in the new format of output for ESSI simulator and visualized in VisIt post-processor where the movie was created.

## NTS (Note-To-Self): Creating dynamically linked libraries

A nice extensive tutorial can be found here.

In a nutshell:

gcc -Wall -fPIC -c \*.c
gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libctest.so.1 -o libctest.so.1.0 \*.o
mv libctest.so.1.0 /opt/lib
ln -sf /opt/lib/libctest.so.1.0 /opt/lib/libctest.so.1
ln -sf /opt/lib/libctest.so.1.0 /opt/lib/libctest.so

• -Wall: include warnings. See man page for warnings specified.
• -fPIC: Compiler directive to output position independent code, a characteristic required by shared libraries. Also see “-fpic”.
• -shared: Produce a shared object which can then be linked with other objects …

## SNE # 0. Stochastic inverse pendulum

This is the first installment of “Small Numerical Experiments” (SNE), a section where I upload and comment (briefly) some small numerical example. The purpose is to prove a point to myself, test some code, ideas, etc.

In this first post I will explore the response of a stochastic inverse pendulum. What I mean in this case is an inverse pendulum (shown left) with a random initial condition. The purpose is to obtain the time-evolving probability density function (PDF) of the pendulum’s position. I will be doing Monte-Carlo simulations to obtain an approximation to this PDF.

The response of the …