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Wind turbines are typically designed based on fatigue and serviceability limit states, but still require an accurate assessment of bearing capacity. Overconsolidated clay deposits in Canada often have a thin layer of crust with a relatively high undrained shear strength. However, existing bearing capacity design methods do not consider surficial crusts. This paper studies the undrained VHMT (vertical, horizontal, moment, and torsional) failure envelope of circular foundations founded on a surficial crust underlain by a uniform soil using finite element analysis. Crust correction factors have been introduced to account for the effects of the stiff layer on the vertical and moment capacities. The same forms of equation that are used for uniform soils, but with different parameters provide satisfactory fits for the failure envelopes for a soil with a crustal layer. An analytical expression for the 4-D VHMT failure envelope is derived, and an application of this method is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soft tissue modeling is an important component in effective surgical simulation systems. A pre-computed finite element method based on elastic models is well suited to modeling soft tissue deformation. This paper addresses two principal issues: the flexibility of the pre-computed FE method and the approximation approach to non-linear elastic models. We describe a dynamic mechanism of the reconfiguration of the contacted nodes and the fixed boundary, without re-computing the inverse of the global stiffness matrix. The flexibility of the pre-computed models is described for both linear and non-linear elastic models.