Itasca releases geotechnical modeling technology for civil, energy engineering
(UI) – Itasca Consulting Group has announced the release of FLAC3D v9, an advanced continuum modeling tool for solving the most challenging geotechnical problems in civil and energy engineering.
Leveraging more than four decades of cutting-edge geomechanical software research and development, FLAC3D v9 is the latest release of Itasca’s industry standard software products such as 3DEC, FLAC, UDEC, and PFC. FLAC3D v9 represents the company’s most advanced geomechanical modeling software, designed for solving complex civil engineering challenges such as slope stability, underground excavation, tunneling, soil-structure interaction, and earthquake simulation.
This new release provides enhanced performance up to 5X faster than before, new computational modeling methods, a new user-defined interface, updated Python support, support for partner products, and much more.
Expanding upon the new release capabilities, Jim Hazzard, Director of Product Development for Itasca, explains, “The fluid logic has been vastly improved, making it faster, more intuitive, and simpler to use. Implicit and explicit algorithms are available for saturated and unsaturated flow, supporting different types of suction and permeability-saturation curves, including user-defined ones. The user can select what algorithm to use or allow the internal servo to switch between implicit and explicit to optimize the solution speed and accuracy.”
“The addition of nonlinear structural elements and a specific constitutive model for concrete within FLAC3D v9 makes it possible to simulate complex soil-structure interactions, allowing for more realistic performance and failure mechanism evaluation.” Jim Hazzard continues, “These new capabilities enhance a civil engineer’s ability to simulate real-world geomechanical conditions.”
Charles Fairhurst, Itasca International Inc. (III) CEO, added, “FLAC3D v9 includes the latest computational algorithms and optimizations to achieve enhanced performance and robustness. Improvements have been made to usability and computational methods that enable practicing engineers to solve many of their most difficult problems quickly and easily.”
FLAC3D v9 is built upon a common framework to be leveraged by all future Itasca software products. Upcoming releases of 3DEC, FLAC2D, and PFC will all integrate into FLAC3D. In doing so, Itasca streamlines the work to model complex engineering models, reducing overhead and simplifying project management. The outcome is a powerful modeling suite that can simplify work across a wide range of engineering simulation. Now available for Windows and Linux.
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