Lauren Talbot, a PhD Candidate in the Soga Research Group, was invited as a guest lecturer for the USACE Prospect Course 247 on seismic analysis of embankment dams. Her presentation was titled “Applying the Material Point Method [MPM] to Model the Runout Phase of a Seismic Analysis”. Lauren discussed MPM and the potential applications in current and future state of practice. To demonstrate this, she uses the well-known Lower San Fernando Dam failure case study, which was modeled using a hybrid FDM-MPM method. More about this case study can be found in the paper “Modeling large-deformation features of the Lower San Fernando Dam failure with the Material Point Method” by Talbot et al. (2024), published in Computers and Geotechnics. She also presented some of her newer visualization work, which is intended as a tool for communication of scientific results.
