About us, SIFEL history
SIFEL is an open source computer code which has been developing since 2001 at the
Department of Mechanics of the
Faculty of Civil Engineering of the
Czech Technical University
in Prague.
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The code beginnings are connected with the European research project MAECENAS which
was solved between 2001 and 2004. It was addressed to assessment of properties of reactor vessels of nuclear power
plants at the end of their service life. The project involved collaboration of five universities across the Europe
(Sheffield, Glasgow, Padova, Nantes and CTU in Prague). The aim of the CTU research group was
to develop extensible computer code for coupled hydro-thermo-mechanical analysis.
There were some computer codes for particular problems at involved universities but
their connection or merging was impossible. Therefore, the development of a new
code was started. The following requirements were determined:
- Portability of the code - universities had different hardware and software equipment.
Especially, the portability between different operating systems was required (Linux, Windows, Unix).
- Simple programming techniques - the members of the project were experts in the branch of mechanical
and transport processes and they knew programming languages but they were not professional programmers.
Source codes should be comprehensible for all team members as well as for new participants.
- Speed of code - the programming language should be compiled (FORTRAN, C++) rather than interpreted (Java).
It was concluded that C++ language will be used but without most of object oriented programming features and
concepts which cause main difficulties for new users.
One of the main goal was the simulation of behaviour of reactor vessel in
Hinkley during 50 years of service life.
These results were used by British Energy company which also supported the MAECENAS project.
The establishing of Centre for Integrated Design of Advanced Structures between 2005-2010 was the another
impetus for the development of the program. The SIFEL was significantly extended by both transport and mechanical
parts and several considerable engineering problems were analysed with help of the program:
- Thermo-mechanical analysis of reactor containment in Temelín
- Thermo-hydro-mechanical analysis of casting procedure of foundation slabs under the groundwater level in
Praha-Těšnov
- Influence of anchorage on concrete behaviour of retaining wall structure
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In course of time, the developer core consolidated into the following group:
Jaroslav Kruis
is author of one book about domain decomposition methods, author of 15 papers in
journals (7 in international journals with impact factor) and 140 conference papers. His areas of
expertise are domain decomposition methods, parallel computing, structural dynamics, numerical
methods in mechanics and material modeling.
Tomáš Krejčí
is author and coauthor of 5 journal papers (4 in international journals with impact
factor) and more than 40 conference papers. He works in the field of heat and moisture transport problems,
coupled problems and he is also experienced in the creep models for concrete.
Tomáš Koudelka
is author and coauthor of 5 journal papers (3 in international journals with impact
factor), one book and more than 50 conference papers. He deals with finite element method,
modeling of concrete, soils and other materials. His field of interest is also programming in C++
and other languages.
There are also some active contributing coworkers:
Jiří Maděra
is author of several coupled models for heat and moisture transport in concrete.
Štěpán Beneš
is author of MeshEditor tool for graphical representation of FE mesh.
Josef Fiedler
is author and coauthor of extensions used for concrete modeling of slabs.
There is also generator for box bridges which was developed by him.
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