Webinar 1: 'Animating Soil Models' - Future of Geotechnical Education at the University Level

Constitutive modeling is a core subject in the field of computational geotechnics, as the quality of predictions made by finite element simulations depends on the quality of the used constitutive model. For many students, constitutive modeling in engineering education is perceived as an abstract and 'hard to grasp' topic. The here presented project 'Animating Soil Models' aims to increase the understanding of constitutive modeling with the help of animations by improving the visual aspect of teaching soil models. Amongst others, the following topics are visualized: yield surfaces, stress invariants, Critical State Soil Mechanics and some related models as the Modified CamClay (MCC) model and clay hypoplasticity. In the sense of open education, the animations will be shared on the platform SoilModels.com under the open license CC BY to use them as teaching and learning material. The animations certainly do not replace studying the equations, computing or reading books. However, they can facilitate teaching and understanding concepts related to constitutive modeling.