Dear Reader,

Good day from here to you; wherever you are reading this newsletter from. I hope all is well around you.

This week's newsletter will focus on the following:

1. How to apply PBCs semi-automatically in ABAQUS
2. Behind the Scenes at CM Videos: Trying out animations
3. Quote for the Week: Carl Newport and the Journalist Approach

How to apply PBCs semi-automatically in ABAQUS

I made a video about manual application of PBCs in ABAQUS. It got a lot of attention and currently it has been seen over 6000 times. This is really amazing and it continues to be one of the main videos seen by people visit my channel. Here is the video here:

In fact, one of the feedback from a viewer on the channel says:

One major feedback from the manual way of applying PBCs is the tedium associated with using the ABAQUS constraints GUI to painstakingly create the nodal sets and constraint equations for all relevant nodes in high mesh density model. The obvious solution is to apply it programmatically using a script and I have PBCGen2D that does so automatically. Although I have made publicly available this fully automatic version of PBCGen2D, it is not free and so some users are unable to use it. I had been thinking of what to do to get many users being equipped to apply PBCs.

This week, I started writing a small MATLAB script that will give users some slight control on how the parameters are entered and also how the relevant PBC-style equations are written. Such script will give users a semi-automatic way of applying PBCs on any 2D quadrilateral domain.

The principle of a semi-automatic approach for imposing PBCs can be summarized in the following:

1. Create an ABAQUS *.INP file from scratch and use the 'Write Input' command in the Jobs Module
2. In MATLAB open an *.txt file, so that you can write into it.
3. Identify all boundary nodes and use these to update the MATLAB script.
4. Create *NSet nodal sets for all the boundary nodes. This would look like this
5. Create *Equations that impose PBCs on the domain
6. Update the original *.INP file with the new *NSet and *Equation commands.

I will be making a video about this over the next weeks, so keep an eye out for that. When the video is made and launched, I will hope you will watch it and let me know what you think about it. Below is a code snippet for using the semi-automatic method.

Behind the Scenes at CM Videos: Trying out animations

If you recall, one of my goals this year was to improve the story telling aspects of my Youtube Videos. My last video was where I told the story of a 1st year PhD student (Steven) and his struggles. I used that to introduce the concept of fibre-edge effects during the design of RVEs.

To extend that ambition, this week, I have been playing around with animations of a short script I wrote for my next video. There are two software I used to do this: (a) Steve AI - an artificial intelligence software the automates the creation of the scenes, characters and their facial expression, and (b) Clipchamp - a Microsoft-owned software that is like a video editor but has an excellent text-to-speech feature.

I will be using these two software to bring my educational videos to life. It is all a massive learning curve but am enjoying it. Below is a still image from one of the scenes of the video I am working on:

Quote of the Week: Cal Newport and Journalist Approach to Deep work

The above is more of a topical issue than a quote. I have been reading Cal Newport's book Deep Work. In this week's quote, I refer to one of the approaches to Deep Work that Cal discussed and this is the Journalist Approach. It demands that the person has to fit into their lifestyle deep high value work whenever the individual can as against waiting for the best time to do a task. According to Cal, there are also other approaches to Deep work such as: monastic, bimodal and rhythmic philosophies of Deep work but I prefer the journalist approach. In fact, here is a good blog article about this, by Doug Neil:

I make this approach my way of working as it fits into my lifestyle currently. For example, I wrote the script for my next video just before midnight last night. After that, I began writing this newsletter before going to bed. After sending my kids off to school, I spent an hour filming my next video based on the script I wrote last night. Then I set off for an 11 am meeting with two of my project students. When those meetings ended, I had a 30 minutes gap before my next appointment. I then reverted back to writing this Quote for the Week section. As my next student came through the door, I stopped the newsletter, spent about 45 minutes with the student, and now returned back to finalizing the newsletter. In about 2 hour's time, I will be delivering a lecture. This is just a snapshot of my day - juggling the home, academic, Youtube and professional demands on my time.

The reason for telling you the above illustration is to explain how I try to incorporate the journalist approach to deep work in my day to day work. If I wait for when I will get an uninterrupted time to write the newsletter, film my videos and develop script for them, there may never be such time. This is because I have a young family which draws on my time. I am a busy academic with responsibility to my students (undergraduates and postgrads, as well as research students and collaborators). I am also writing the manuscript of my PBC book (sign up here to join my book writing journey). All these are knowledge- and time-intensive. The only way to succeed in them is to make sure I work deeply at every moment I get.

If you find yourself overwhelmed, then maybe find those moments when you can work deeply on projects even if it is for a few minutes. For example, if you are strugglign with writing a 240 page thesis, maybe set aside time to work on one page, at the next time you have a small window of time.

Wow! Here is to the end of another newsletter. Thank you for reading so far.

If you enjoyed it and know someone who can benefit from the contents, then please pass it on to the person(s). I wish you a wonderful weekend and will catch up next week Viszlát, (which is bye bye in Hungarian).