Everywhere land interacts with water, claiming new habitable space or exploiting natural resources can quickly become a major challenge. The MPM-DREDGE project is providing a numerical tool to help engineers rise to such challenge with a focus on the dredging industry – a sector worth EUR 7 billion.
Without computers, investigating soil-fluid interactions is a real money pit. It requires large scale experiments where wind, gravity, waves, currents and changing seabed characteristics have to be factored in and change with every new location. A software overcoming the numerical issues associated with large deformations and fluid pressures that occur in the interaction between soils and fluids, on the other hand, could be a real game changer.
Further information: Software innovation lends a hand to the dredging industry