Pavia, 9th - 13th May 2011
Objectives of the course
The objective of this short course is to provide graduate students —both at MS and PhD levels— and practicing engineers with the fundamental concepts and theory of dynamic soil-structure interaction (SSI), with special focus on the numerical tools currently available to model such problems in earthquake engineering practice. Although the course touches upon all aspects of the theory and the numerical modeling for seismic problems, emphasis will be given on the basic concepts, including elements of vibration theory, wave propagation in the ground and their interaction with foundations and structures, earthquake source mechanisms, wave amplification in soft soil deposits and the interaction of small and large scale foundations and buildings erected on compliant soil. Both linear and non linear aspects of modeling will be covered. The course will include both theoretical lectures and hands-on solutions by the attendees of practical problems obtained via simple Matlab programs.
The course is taught by Eduardo Kausel, a senior Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, and a faculty member at Rose School.
About the instructor
Eduardo Kausel earned his first professional degree in 1967, graduating as a Civil Engineer from the University of Chile. After working for two years at Chile’s National Electricity Company, he carried out post-graduate studies in 1969 at the Technical University in Darmstadt with a scholarship from the German government (DAAD).In 1970, he moved to the United States, and earned his Master of Science (MS, 1972) and Doctor of Science (Sc.D., 1974) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following his graduation at MIT, Dr. Kausel worked in the industry at Stone and Webster Engineering Corporation in Boston, and then joined the MIT faculty in 1978, where he has remained since and is currently a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the state of Massachusetts, is senior member of various professional organizations (ASCE, SSA, EERI, IACMG), and has extensive experience as consulting engineer.
Among the honors he has received are a 1989 Japanese Government Research Award for Foreign Specialists from the Science and Technology Agency; an Honorary Faculty Member in Epsilon Chi since 1992 (of only 2 in his department), the 1994 Konrad Zuse Guest Professor at the University of Hamburg in Germany, the Humboldt Prize from the German Government in 2000, and the 2001 MIT-CEE Award for Conspicuously Effective Teaching.
Dr. Kausel is best known for his work on Dynamic Soil-Structure Interaction, and for the very successful Green’s functions he developed for the dynamic analysis of layered media, which are now incorporated in several well-known and widely used programs. Dr. Kausel is the author of some hundred and fifty technical papers and reports in the areas of structural dynamics, earthquake engineering, and computational mechanics. Among these is his recent book “Fundamental Solutions in Elastodynamics” published by Cambridge University Press.
Further Information
Further information can be found by following links below:
Announcement flyer (registration info., contacts etc.)