How it all
began
LUSAS software has its origins even
earlier than the company's start up in 1982.
Back
in January 1970, LUSAS Managing Director, Dr Paul Lyons, was a
student in the Structures Section of the Civil Engineering
Department at Imperial College - formerly a constituent
college of the University of London. Whilst studying for his PhD
he wrote the first of what would eventually become many millions
of lines of code - and the London University Structural Analysis
System (LUSAS) was born.
Three years were spent writing the
first version of LUSAS which comprised just beam, shell, and
solid elements. It only handled linear elastic analysis and used a
frontal solution method. One by one other researchers got involved
with writing LUSAS code for their PhD work too, and shortly afterwards
the software was enhanced to handle nonlinear analysis. Dr Paul Lyons
explains: "The development work initially focussed on
nonlinear shells because, at the time, a lot of work in the civil
engineering department was related to box girder bridges." In
fact
two well publicised and tragic bridge collapses had recently taken place -
Milford Haven Bridge in Wales and West Gate Bridge in Sydney, Australia -
and as a result there was a lot of steel bridge testing and
research going on. He continues: "Although these collapses
were terrible events the research that was carried out afterwards
allowed us to compare the results from LUSAS
with experimental test results and fine-tune the software to
ensure we got good correlation. Looking back, the elasto-plastic
deformation analysis that we carried out then was very important
because it laid the foundations for the nonlinear strengths of
LUSAS today."
Following work as a research fellow
at Imperial College, in 1978 he went to Kingston University to
develop the software further, adding more elements and providing
better solution methods to make LUSAS more usable and commercially
viable. Then, in 1982, along with co-director Dr David Irving, who
had also helped with developing LUSAS at Kingston University, he set-up Finite Element Analysis
Limited,
based in modest offices in Holborn, London, and began selling and
further developing the software. He remembers: "Scott Wilson
Kirkpatrick and Partners were our very first customer - something
we shall always be indebted to them for". Now part of Aecom, they are still customers -
something we at LUSAS are very proud of.
Retaining
and listening to our long established clients has been an
important part of our success over the years. As more and more
clients came on board, company turnover and staff numbers
increased so that in 1987 it forced a move to larger riverside
offices in Kingston upon Thames, where the company still trades
from today. From here the push to get LUSAS used by more engineers internationally
started and a team of carefully chosen regional distributors was
signed up.
Over the years a number of key
developments and changes to the software have taken place. The
initial graphical user interface written in the mid 1980s was
re-written in the 1990s to take advantage of the C++ programming language
and LUSAS Modeller came into being. Application-specific software
packages such as LUSAS Bridge and LUSAS Composite, all based upon LUSAS
Solver technology, were then introduced to meet the
specific analysis needs of clients in different industries. Multi-frontal solutions (fast solver
options) were added to give clients the option to produce results
ten to twenty times faster than frontal solutions for certain types of
analysis. Another key development was the creation of a parallel version of LUSAS which
was seen
to be of great importance because, as Dr Paul Lyons said when it
was introduced:
"This is the way the engineering industry is
going to go - solving with parallel processors."
LUSAS has now expanded and is now well established in
many regions around the world and especially in the United States
of America where, in the bridge, civil, and structural engineering analysis
markets many high-profile consultants and much valued
Departments of Transportation use LUSAS software for both
its general and its advanced analysis capabilities. LUSAS also
responded to the emerging engineering analysis market in China and developed a Chinese language version to meet
this demand. Now, numerous bridge, civil, structural and Liquid
Natural Gas projects have benefitted from the capabilities of the
software for these applications.
In 2012, with LUSAS
celebrating its 30th anniversary, the West Gate Bridge was again
in the headlines but this time for different reasons. The West
Gate Bridge Upgrade project saw LUSAS used by long-standing
clients Flint & Neill (now part of COWI) to prove its
strengthening design for the bridge to enable it to carry extra
traffic lanes.
Now, as of writing, in October 2017, LUSAS is
celebrating its 35th anniversary in the same year as two major
bridge projects in the United Kingdom with LUSAS involvement - The
Queensferry Crossing and The Mersey Gateway - are both completed and
open for use.
All staff at LUSAS take great pleasure in providing the
software tools, capabilities and support services to help our
clients achieve success, and look forward to helping them to do so
for many more years to come.
1st October
2017
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