Tasmania Chapter 50th anniversary celebration

You may be aware that 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the Australian Geomechanics Society (AGS). The AGS Tasmania Chapter is having a gathering to celebrate this milestone, where past and present members, and industry stakeholders, can come together.

We would be delighted if you could join us.

Date: Friday 6 November 2020
Time: 5:45 pm for 6:00pm start
Location: The Pickled Pear, University Club, University of Tasmania
Dress: Smart casual
RSVP 23rd October, 2020, to [email protected]

Highlights of this event will be:

The event will conform to social distancing requirements. A 3-course sit-down dinner will be served at your table, so you can eat, drink and socialise safely. Alcohol is available for purchase.

We welcome any members to say a few words, if you feel inclined. Please notify Rowenna if you would like to do this, by Nov 3rd 2020.

We look forward to seeing you on the night.

Speaker

Dr Mojtaba Mohammadnejad, UTAS PhD thesis prize winner

Dr Mojtaba Mohammadnejad holds a Bachelor and Master of mining engineering, and a PhD in geomechanics from the University of Tasmania. His main area of expertise includes the assessment of rock mass quality, stability analysis of rural and urban slopes and excavations, and rock fracturing. In his PhD study, he focused on the development, calibration, and application of a newly developed code for the simulation of the rock failure process in collaboration with CSIRO. The outcome of his PhD research was published as five articles in high impact journals, and several conference papers in the fields of rock mechanics and computational mechanics, and three of them were awarded as the best papers. Mojtaba has published over twenty peer-reviewed journal and conference articles and has served as a reviewer for several international conferences and scientific journals. Currently, he is working as an engineer at Grange Resources, Savage River Mine, and as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Tasmania.

Abstract – Advanced FDEM modelling of rock fracture process and applications in rock cutting

The hybrid Finite‐Discrete Element Method (FDEM) is a widely used numerical technique in engineering applications involving material fracture, which, however, is computationally expensive and needs further development, especially when rock fracture progressive process is modelled. In a research project at the University of Tasmania, a parallelised FDEM with the use of a general‐purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) using compute unified device architecture (CUDA) C/C++ was introduced. A number of new features such as the local damping, contact damping, contact friction, adaptive contact detection activation and mass scaling were implemented in the FDEM code. Furthermore, a number of simulations with both quasi‐static and dynamic loading conditions were conducted using the GPGPU‐parallelised FDEM. For the calibration and verification porpuses, the obtained results were then compared qualitatively and/or quantitatively against the published theoretical results and/or physical experiment. Finally, a series of rock scratch tests with various cutting velocities and cutting depths were modelled using the GPGPU‐parallelised FDEM. Compared with recent numerical studies on rock cutting process, this study successfully modelled the change in average cutting force within the ductile-brittle transition area similar to reported trends from experimental observations.

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